The Irony of Suppression

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 placed renewed emphasis on suppression lists in the world of email marketing. Babcock & Jenkins had done its due diligence long before the law required us to. Yet there are still events that can lead to people who’ve unsubscribed getting an unwanted email. How ?

Assume Bill Johnson works for Widget Co. and Widget Co. has secured the email domain widgetco.com for its employees. Bill is assigned the email address: billj@widgetco.com.

A few years go by and Widget Co. realizes they should secure widgetco.net as an email domain for employees as well. So now Bill can be reached at billj@widgetco.net as well as his original .com email address.

Bill is a busy guy and signs up for an industry newsletter one day using billj@widgetco.com, and then again a week later using billj@widgetco.net. He later decides he doesn’t want the newsletter and unsubscribes using the billj@widgetco.com address. See where I’m going here? That’s right, he’ll still get the newsletter via the billj@widgetco.net address and he’ll be angry that his unsubscribe request didn’t take.

Doesn’t sound like a very likely scenario? How about these additional ways email address confusion can contribute to a failed unsubscribe attempt by Bill.

• His email address is part of a group and someone has signed up for a communication using the group email address.
• Bill has a Yahoo, Gmail and home email address through his ISP. Having so many email addresses could add to Bill’s subscribing multiple times.
• Bill mis-typed his email address when unsubscribing.
• Bill uses his PDA to receive all his various email addresses into one email inbox. He doesn’t always notice which email address he’s receiving an email from when he’s using this inbox.
• Bill works as a consultant for a large multi-national company and moves around from one subsidiary to another using different emails depending on which office he’s working out of.

The best way for Bill to ensure he’s left off an email list is to unsubscribe from that list using every email address he can be reached at. In other words, the more information Bill gives a company about him the better he can be excluded from communications.