Manipulating People When They Try To Unsubscribe

You know the drill–once upon a time you thought it would be interesting to get a company’s regular (monthly, weekly, or, heaven forbid, daily) emails. Or, more likely, you entered a contest, completed an online quiz, or got a special offer on a purchase and did not read every word of fine print. Sometimes, this turned out to be a good relationship–I don’t mind Amazon’s book recommendations or Winkflash’s photo book sales, for example, and I’ve been getting them for years. But most of the time, at some point you’ve had enough. You’re ready to unsubscribe.

You’ve made your decision. You go into their most recent email, click the unsubscribe button, and then are taken to a special webpage, designed not to help you unsubscribe, but to convince you not to. Here’s a fairly standard message:

Retention is important for companies, and they want you to stay on their email list for as long as possible. This is the standard message to get you to stay: you will lose something by leaving us. We like you, you like us. Please don’t leave. It’s like a needy boyfriend that you never meant to say “yes” to, standing next to your middle school locker.

Other companies are a little more heavy-handed. Let’s give a little background first–I once took a quiz on RealAge to find out, well, my “real age.” I got on their email list, and never actually read a single email. In unsubscribed from them in 2010, and spent 2 years of bliss, enjoying my slightly-less-cluttered inbox. At the beginning of 2012, they re-injected my email into their system, and started me sending emails again. (Note: they are not the only company that recycles their unsubscribed customers, a practice I disagree with. I’ve also had to unsubscribe twice from KOA.)

Here’s the message I got from RealAge when I attempted to unsubscribe (the second time):

Same argument as the first, but heavy-handed and even manipulative. But don’t worry–I held on to my original plan to unsubscribe, clicked the necessary buttons, and (probably) managed to be removed from their email list. Of course, it may take up to 10 days for my request to be processed–a standard caveat. It would have been easier to mark them as spam, and next time I will.

The thing is, they wouldn’t make these arguments to get people to stay unless they worked a healthy percentage of the time.

I’ve also gotten these email when I’m not as connected to my social networks as they’d like me to be–unless you change the settings, Facebook now emails you with what you missed if you don’t log on regularly, and Twitter is rather concerned that I haven’t tweeted since June 30th (I’m not sure whether it was of last year, or the year before). Here’s the email they sent me:

The assumption is that there is something lacking in my life–or if I don’t feel like something is lacking, it’s only because I don’t realize what I’m missing. Each of these companies–RealAge, KOA, Twitter, and many more–believes that they can feel that gap, that I will feel happy and whole only through them. They all have things to offer, and maybe some day I will go back to Twitter or camp at a KOA. I find fulfillment through blogging and through interacting with my friends on Facebook. But if I’m relying on email subscriptions or social networks to make me whole, then something obviously is lacking, something that the Internet can’t solve. Perhaps there’s a big “Unsubscribe from the Web” button–I need it sometimes.