Making it easy to unsubscribe

This morning, I wanted to unsubscribe from a monthly email newsletter that no longer interests me. At the bottom of their graphics-heavy newsletter was the following (actual size):

I’ve included in there some Gmail links just to show you how unreadable that tiny grey aliased text is. (I’ve blurred out the website’s name in the middle.) Since it was an image, I couldn’t resize it to make it easier to read. There was also no quick link to unsubscribe (which is the ideal way) nor a link to the part of the site I needed to go to.

The instructions didn’t work either. Seems they have changed their website’s CMS and there was no option to turn off the newletters. All I could do was “un-activate” (since when did that become a word?).

Oh, and one final frustrating point? The layout was completely unreadable in Firefox and I had to completely update my profile before being allowed to cancel anything:

I know they don’t want to lose customers but if your exit experience is a bad one, that’s the last experience you’re going to remember and tell other people about.

I’m experiencing this now in an offline context as well. I’ve been trying to cancel an account for over three weeks with a company. I’ve made over a dozen phone calls, spent far too long on hold and got nowhere so far.

Back to websites, it’s a good idea to test any unsubscribing feature on your websites and check that the instructions are updated if the site is too!