One of our customers recently began sending out Digest Mails to their corporate customers. After the sending was over, we noticed something curious - there were an extraordinary number of unsubscribes, something we had never seen before. So what was going on?
Upon deeply debugging we noticed a few things:
- Unsubscribe was happening only from a few corporate domains (usually using the Microsoft mail system)
- Was happening for most or all the email IDs which had been mailed on that domain
- Was happening within a very short time of the email being sent out
- And ALL links in the email were being clicked pretty much at the same second
Quite obviously this was being performed by bots, and not humans, and its easy to deduce that this was some kind of link test performed by the email system. Upon various checking, this is a Microsoft feature called Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Safe Links, which scans and loads all links to test for scam and malware.
Of course, who can blame organizations and Microsoft from wanting to protect their users from endless shitty malicious threats on the Internet.
Unfortunately, this also ends up triggering our frictionless and bullshit free “1-click unsubscribe” 🤷♀️
Failure of the 1-click unsubscribe experience
We pride ourselves on 1-click unsubscribe experience. All broadcast mails carry an unsubscribe link at the bottom which allows one to unsubscribe from the broadcast mail category with just 1 single click on the unsub link.
Its simple, its robust, its frictionless, and its bullshit free. Quoting from my previous story on this subject:
If I had a $ for every mail I've received with a pretend unsubscribe link at the bottom, which doesn't actually work, or even if it works, doesn't actually stop the mails from coming - I would be quite rich by now. And this is an affliction that all well known branded and recognized Indian companies, big and small, suffer from - financial companies, startups, food delivery, banks, media companies and publishers, you name it.
Solution - needlessly add friction to the unsubscribe experience 😒
So there we have it - turns out our unsubscribe experience was so frictionless, even a bot could exercise it.
So now we need to add a manual step to unsubscribe which can only be performed by a human - ie a button press for unsubscribe confirmation.
This then also has the added benefit that it can take of various other accidental clicks. Here's Mailchimp on this subject:
To help limit accidental unsubscribes caused by inbox filters from impacting your list, Mailchimp has a confirmation step when a customer clicks unsubscribe in the body of your emails. For example, when a customer clicks the unsubscribe link from the footer of your marketing email, we’ll take them to your unsubscribe form to confirm that they’d like to unsubscribe from your list.
There are a few reasons a subscribed contact may show as unsubscribed when they didn't request it:
They forwarded the email from their inbox, and the secondary recipient clicked the unsubscribe link. Unsubscribe links are tied to the original recipient. Encourage contacts to use the Forward to a Friend link instead.
Some inbox filters click each link in your email, and that can accidentally unsubscribe contacts. If the contact knows they didn't forward your email, ask them to contact their IT or hosting service about this issue.
Did you post your version of the email on a website? If someone clicks the unsubscribe link on a shared email, it will unsubscribe the original recipient. Set up an email archive to protect against this.
Another account admin may have accidentally unsubscribed them.
