LashBack has long recommended the best practice of using the List Unsubscribe Header (RFC 2369) as the mechanism to unsubscribe consumers from commercial email. Every receiver needs to adopt this standard. It’s great to see Google recently offering this powerful feature to Gmail users and more receivers need to follow their lead. We have to give props to Hotmail for being first out of the gate and seemingly taking the service one important step further. In nearly 6 years of monitoring unsubscribe performance, LashBack can publish a fascinating statistic showing how using the List Unsubscribe Header does work, but also offer critical insight on that same data when not to trust a seemingly worthy sender’s unsubscribe process.

Current LashBack data shows there is a 1 in 10 chance that a sender using the List Unsubscribe Header will not be successful in unsubscribing consumers.

In this 10% of unsubscribe failures, believe it or not, a best case scenario for the consumer is that they continue to receive email from only the original sender. Don’t get me wrong, if this continues it annoys the consumer and has serious negative consequences for the marketer. It will lower the marketer’s UnsubScore- a measure of unsubscribe performance, and probably cause consumer spam complaints, further harming the marketer’s email reputation which defines deliverability. The worst case scenario for consumers, in .5% of failed unsubscribes for organizations utilizing the List Unsubscribe Header- is when the process breakdown causes the consumer’s email address to end up on a compromised suppression file (opt-out list) which ends up getting hammered with spam. The consumer unsubscribes once, and in return gets even more email. Trust then becomes the real issue.

Hotmail is not only using the List Unsubscribe Header, but also checking the reputation of the sender for that 1 in 10 chance it might not be a good idea to unsubscribe from a source that would most likely appear to be trustworthy as part of the  List Unsubscribe user segment of the email sender population. However, appearances do not define reputation. Historical unsubscribe performance data does show who can be trusted with a consumer’s unsubscribe based on several datapoints derived from constant monitoring and testing over time. That’s why LashBack implores all commercial email senders to follow all unsubscribe best practices and constantly monitor and test their unsubscribe process and that of their sending partners, to protect reputation and most importantly the email experience of consumers.

More LashBack Resources:

List Unsubscribe Domain Reputation Data

Reputation ToolBox

Coverage:

Unsubscribing Made Easy from Google's Blog

Gmail Tries To Make It Easier To Unsubscribe From Spam Newsletters, But Fails from TechCrunch