Sorry Derrick

So one of the things I do at work is deal with the ‘general mailbox’ … including all the email that comes to non-existent users on our domain. Most days this includes various degrees of subscriptions and junk mail and outright spam sent to former employees who no longer have an active email account.

Today it was unsubscribing from Groupon emails being sent to a former coworker. I have my doubts about how effective unsubscribing from this one will be, but this is without a doubt the most brilliant unsubscribe confirmation page I’ve ever seen.

You guessed it … who can resist clicking on ‘punish Derrick’ just to see what will happen, and yes, it ends with a guilt-laden plea to resubscribe.

So, the user is going to think twice about unsubscribing. As the manager of a Mailchimp account I can certainly see the value in that. We regularly have users accidentally unsubscribe from our mailing list. I started to figure it out when a member of our congregational council wondered why she wasn’t getting the newsletter any more. Sure enough, Mailchimp showed that she had managed to unsubscribe herself. Now I occasionally go through the unsubscribe list to see if there are a few people I need to check in with to see if that was really their intent.

And, even if you did really mean to unsubscribe, I think it would leave the user with a more positive impression of the sender … as more human, with a sense of humor, than as a nasty spammer.

That is, assuming unsubscribing actually worked and I don’t get more email from Groupon tomorrow 🙂