MindComet

Before You Go…

I was *this close* from unsubscribing from Shopittome.com‘s newsletter this morning, but once I clicked on the unsubscribe link from my daily sales alert, I was taken to the page below:

I immediately reconsidered my decision of opting out… all because of their variety of appealing preferences. The three preference options broke down as follows: “Take a Temporary Break”, “Make Salemail More Affordable” and “Receive Emails Less Often”. Perfect. Instead of opting out, I set a maximum price of $80 and chose to receive only one email a week. Rather than completely removing myself from their list (in turn remaining a potential revenue source), I stayed on board while receiving emails less frequently featuring less expensive items. This is a surefire way—and a great example of how—to retain your contacts and lower your opt out rates.

What other examples of creative and efficient unsubscribe / preference pages has anyone else seen recently? Comment below!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 18, 2009

Reebok’s Preference Center

No one enjoys filling out forms… at all.  I don’t care what it’s for; it’s always a tedious and mind-numbing experience.  Just about every website that requires a login has the same boring form waiting to be filled out: name, email, password, address, birthday, gender… you know the type.

Reebok‘s site, however, is not “run-of-the-mill” or typical in any way… especially their sign up process. Since they make sporting equipment for a variety of athletic endeavors, they give users the option to scale up or down their interest in a specific sport.  If you are an avid basketball player you can slide your level up to 10. If you train in the off-season, you can slide fitness & training to 6.  You get the idea. There’s also a color preference and an “on the field / off the field” setting. This determines where you’re most likely to wear their products: off the field or on the field. Clever stuff.  I signed up last week and I’ve yet to receive anything from Reebok other than the confirmation email.  I’m hoping the messages I receive reflect my interest settings.

What Reebok is doing is very smart. They’re surveying their users for future product development as well as potentially messaging their users on a very specific and personal level.  It’s a win-win.  And to get back to my original point: I wasn’t bored stiff by filling this form out. It was an interesting user experience which kept me engaged and on their site for a good fifteen minutes longer than I normally would be.

Has anyone else seen any unique email sign up forms?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 04, 2009

Triple Opt In?

I signed up for a slew of gaming emails last year. We were working for a few video game production houses & developers and I was researching their competitors. I was trying to gain insight into what worked for their competitors and where they fell on their faces.  I took notes vigorously of how email for video games worked.

The majority of the competitors had decent email programs. Most had a painless sign up process, engaging emails and all were CAN-SPAM compliant. I also found that they—collectively—know when to scale back their sends when a subscriber isn’t responding or when they’re inactive.

This morning, I was checking my “B2C Emails” folder and I noticed that for some reason or another my SEGA emails were going to my personal account. For the sake of consistency (and unhealthy OCD patterns), I needed to change this to my work email address.  Upon logging back in, I did so… and it was rather painless.

Shortly thereafter, I received another email from SEGA… this time asking me to re-opt-in.

The copy reads:

“To activate your account and join the SEGA PASS community
click the confirmation link below:“

What? Why? My account is already active! To SEGA this means that since I updated my address, I need to re-double-opt-in… or triple-opt-in, as it were. It seems like this is either a matter of list integrity or a redundancy issue they didn’t test for. I think a quick and easy fix to this confusion would be a change in copy… Maybe something along the lines of:

“Thanks for updating your profile. Confirm your change below:“

What do you think? Am I wrong to be annoyed by this? Or am I just being overly critical?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 09, 2009