I received an email from a website today saying that since I hadn’t been reading the weekly newsletter, they were going to automatically unsubscribe me unless I resubmitted by subscription. Now, I thought this was odd for a number of reasons.

First, I am a paying member of this website. In fact, it is the only website I can think of off the top of my head that I pay for the content behind the login screen.

Second, I visited this site and logged in within the last week. I know this for certain since it is a cooking site, and I was grabbing a recipe I have made from the site previously.

Third, this email newsletter is (I believe) for paying subscribers only.

Fourth, I still have six months left on my current membership cycle.

So I next looked in my Outlook and noticed “Click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this message.” Ah, yes, a 1×1 tracking pixel was in the email. So yes, because Outlook didn’t download images - and honestly, it wasn’t obvious there were pictures missing, since there were no other images within the message that I could click to get the images - I am being automatically unsubscribed.

Now, I can see the fact that websites might not want to send newsletters to those who aren’t reading them. But I am a paying member, who has logged in very recently, yet I am being unsubscribed because my current email program of choice doesn’t download images…. nor do many of the other email programs that the majority of people use these days.

What should this website have done instead? A few things…

First, why not aknowledge the fact that I could really be reading your newsletter even though your tracking pixels say otherwise? Adding something like “Some email programs don’t open images, so you might be reading our newsletter with eager anticipation the moment it hits your in box, but we just don’t realize it. Confirming your subscription will help us know that you are indeed reading your newsletter, even if our techies think you aren’t.”

Check if the lack of reading is because it is getting caught up in a spam filter. Include something along the lines of “Is this the first time you have heard anything from the ____ newsletter since you first signed up? If so, reconfirm your subscription, then be sure to add us@somerecipesite.com to your white list, so the next one won’t accidentily end up in your spam folder.”

Check my subscription. It can’t be hard to match active subscribers with non-active ones, especially when its all tied to the same email address.

Then, if I don’t reconfirm my email address, then step up to the plate and email a couple of weeks later with the

We know that unwanted e-mail can be a hassle, so we want to make sure you’d like to continue your subscription. If you’d like to keep receiving weekly newsletters from us, please click here. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll unsubscribe you.

message that I actually did receive today from this website.

Moral of the story: Don’t use 1×1 tracking pixels to track just who is reading your email newsletter, especially when you are using it to automatically unsubscribe readers from that newsletter. Not only will your numbers be waaaaay off, but you will lose loyal readers who might forget to reconfirm or are annoyed by the fact they are getting automatically unsubscribed. And of course, not to mention the impact it has on those who suddenly are reminded that big brother is watching to see which newsletters they are reading and how often they read.

And for the record, I decided not to resubscribe because of how they handled it.

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Written on March 4, 2008 at 2:14 pm and filed under Reputation Management, Usability. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.