Choose Your Own Email Adventure

One of the top reasons customers opt out of retailers’ email lists is that they get too many emails. But how many is too many varies from customer to customer. How to decide how often to mail? Simple: let the customer do it. According to DMNews, some 35 percent of retailers let subscribers reduce the number of messages they got in 2009. That’s more than twice as many as 2008’s 16 percent, but there’s a ways yet to go.

Meanwhile, the bad news is retailers are making it harder to opt out altogether, not easier: 39 percent require three or more clicks to opt out, up from 7 percent in 2008. The whole point of opting out is not to pester people who don’t want to hear from your store; why make it harder to let them go without ticking them off?