Spam and unsubscribe buttons
Webmail and spam buttons
If you have an email address list dominated by consumers, then a significant percentage of those addresses are likely from big web-based email services like hotmail.com, yahoo.com and gmail.com.
Web-based means people view and manage their email by visiting a website. They log in and the web service displays their emails and offers various tools for managing that email.
The advantage to the user is that they can check and send email from anywhere that lets them visit websites: they don't need to be sitting on their home computer.
Anyone viewing an email at one of these services has the option to mark the email as spam. They do this simply by clicking on a prominent "this is spam" button displayed next to their email.
The actual wording of the button may vary. Here are three screenshots from Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail:
Hotmail "spam" button:
Yahoo "spam" button:
Gmail "spam" button:
Why is this of interest to email marketers?
Ordinarily, this is irrelevant to email marketers. If you're not sending spam, who cares, right? Wrong.
Many users of these services use the "spam" button as a way of getting rid of email they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing (which requires effort and may not work) they tag your message as spam. That means in future it gets blocked or routed directly to the junk mail folder.
According to one source, almost 37% of consumers have used the spam button "...as a way to unsubscribe from things they had asked to receive."
That's not a disaster, except the web email service collates all this data about spam reports to help build a picture about the reputation of particular senders.
Which means a spam report is another black mark against your name and could lead to your emails being blocked wholesale by that service. If enough people tag your email as spam, nobody using that email service will ever see your emails. Even those who want to.
It's not as drastic as it sounds. These services know that some spam reports are really just unsubscribes in another form. A few such reports shouldn't harm you. But it's still a risk factor that has long been a bone of contention for ethical email marketers.
The unsubscribe button
There is an alternative now being slowly introduced by these services. If a sender fulfills particular requirements, then the "this is spam" button isn't even displayed. In its place is an "unsubscribe" button.
So instead of a spam report, you just get an unsubscribe request. Instead of dumping your emails by marking them as spam, the recipient simply hits the unsubscribe button. The service then sends you the unsubscribe request.
This is a much better system. It solves the problem of false spam reports very nicely. You would lose that recipient anyway, so much better to take them off the list than have them report you as spam. Plus you save yourselves the expense of sending further email to that address (email which would never arrive).
However...
It's early days, yet, so hard to draw conclusions, but the unsubscribe button is not quite the panacea it sounds.
At the time of writing, only Microsoft's Windows Live web email service is using the button, though others are expected to follow suit.
Where's the catch?
The problem is in the requirements determining whether the spam or unsubscribe button is displayed.
First, you need to have an additional header in your outgoing emails containing the correct information on how to unsubscribe (so the service knows what to do when a user clicks on the unsubscribe button). You'll need to talk to your email service about this.
Second, your email must meet some kind of quality criteria. The webmail services need to be sure you're a legitimate sender. They won't dispense with the spam reporting button unless they're very sure you're not sending spam.
What criteria?
It looks at the moment as if your sender address needs to be in the address book of the recipient for the unsubscribe button to activate. There are indications that certain certification programs might also qualify you for the unsubscribe button.
It's too soon to say at the moment.
The point is that though the unsubscribe button is a welcome improvement for email marketers, it may be quite hard for your emails to meet the requirements necessary for its display.
I'll be updating this article as I get more information.
Further reading:
This article at ClickZ...
or this one and this one at DIRECT.
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