Personalize Your "Unsubscribe" Option

The problem with most opt-in or opt-out email lists – probably with 90% or more of them – is that the marketer presents the option to each customer as a simple binary choice. Do you want the emails or not? Yes or no. But with respect to their desire for or tolerance of messaging from you, your customers are more like volume dials than they are like on-off switches.

Customers are all different; they have different levels of involvement with the brands they deal with, and different levels of interest in hearing the latest offers. So a much more inviting, trustable, and engaging way to allow your customers to manage their relationship with you is to allow each customer to choose their own preferred frequency. You don't have to make everything a yes-or-no decision. If you’re looking for a mechanism to better connect with both your raving fans as well as your moderately loyal customers, with your privacy-craving customers as well as your overworked techies and your laissez faire consumers, you should offer your customers choices with respect to how frequently they want you to reach out to them.

Mendocino Farms does it the right way, as I learned the other day. A chain of “sandwich markets” with three dozen outlets throughout California and another half-dozen in Texas, Mendocino Farms offers a flavorful and practical menu of sandwiches and salads that my family has enjoyed repeatedly, especially with the home-delivery options that have become available during the pandemic. They put me on their email list after our first take-out order, but as much as I like their food, after a while I tired of being reminded so often, so I clicked the “unsubscribe” button. To my surprise I was presented with the RIGHT way for a business to approach this task, as this was the screen I was immediately connected to:

Now here’s the thing about this kind of personalization. On the surface, all it amounts to for the customer is a way to maintain personal control of the frequency with which their messages are directed to them. And in Mendocino Farms’ case, the company is offering a choice among four specific communication frequencies, in addition to the complete “unsubscribe” option. So for the customer, it’s merely a pleasing way to customize their relationship with Mendocino Farms.

But think about what Mendocino is getting, just by offering this sort of choice to its customers. The choice each individual customer makes will tell the company more about that particular customer’s attitude toward Mendocino’s marketing, and it will buttress their insight into the customer’s overall needs. The point is, customer-specific data of all kinds will generate customer-specific insights, over time, and the more data a marketer compiles – especially when it involves an individual customer taking some specific action – the more insight the marketer will be able to develop.?It's that simple.