I like companies that make it easy to trade with them. I also like companies that make it easy for me to stop trading with them.
Google is a company which is actually great at this, it doesn’t matter which of their services you use they allow you to own your data and take it away whenever you want to. They allow you to download your documents, get your traffic stats and even provide an export for something as basic as your RSS feeds in Google Reader. They’re basically saying “We’re great, we’ll make it easy for you to leave because we don’t think you’ll want to. If you do want to leave that’s OK though, we understand sometimes people do want to leave and we’ll make it easy for you.
Adidas on the other hand appear to want to make it as difficult as possible. All I want to do is unsubscribe from their email marketing and bizarrely they’ve put a reCAPTURE on their unsubscribe page.
I can understand this on a sign up page, but I just want to leave. Every other company I’ve wanted to unsubscribe from are either lazy enough to give me a page where I simply have to type in my email address, or provided a link within their emails which pre-populated the email address field.
There’s a lot to be said for making it easy for people to unsubscribe from your email marketing or choose to stop using your services. It doesn’t matter if it’s your email marketing, or if you provide services such as webhosting, telephone services, analytics or accounting software. If a business wants to leave make it was easy and painless as possible for them to take their data and go. Sure there might be a minimum contract period, but after that leaving should be easy.
The one thing that’s guaranteed is if you make leaving an easy pleasant experience one day then customer might come back, but if you make it as hard as possible to leave they’ll be double wary of signing up with you in the future.
How easy is it to subscribe and unsubscribe from your email marketing and/or services and what’s the best and worst experiences you’ve had of leaving a company?
One Response
Apps in the eBay Apps Center all have a consistent way to unsubscribe. You do it from the Manage Applications tab. Yet being unable to unsubscribe is one of the top complaints I see reading the reviews of the different apps. Incidentally the button to unsubscribe is right next to the button to review the app.