Michele, My ... My!

For some reason, a few months back I began receiving emails from a company called Michele. Other than my middle name being Michelle (spelled with 2 l's), I can't thing of a single common thread between me and this company. I've never purchased from them, and in fact haven't a clue what they sell, despite receiving many emails over that time period.

Anyway, I decided time had come to end the non-existent relationship between my inbox and Michele. This is the most recent email I received, on July 23:



This email has its share of issues, not the least of which being - Where is the unsubscribe link?!?

Can you find it? I couldn't. So, I marked it as spam. Hopefully Michele's ESP has an auto-unsubscribe feature when a complaint code is returned, or I'll keep getting these... since I still can't figure out how I am supposed to unsubscribe. If I get another, I'll reply to the email address from which it was sent, but something tells me it will bounce.

Hiding an unsubscribe link won't get you fewer unengaged subscribers, but it will give you a huge complaint rate and most likely, a blacklist entry. Make your unsubscribe link easy to find and easy to use, so that people who don't want to receive your emails, won't. You don't want indifferent subscribers!

Update: I did, finally, find the unsubscribe link. It is buried at the very bottom (in WHITE on BLACK, shame shame) in mouse type. When I clicked it, it opened a new window with just "Your e-mail address has been unsubscribed" floating in plain Times New Roman (at least it was black on a white background!). I'm guessing it was their ESP (Silverpop)'s default unsubscribe message. What a bad user experience.