Spot the unsubscribe!

When email marketing met Where’s Waldo?

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Not sure if bad UX or actually a dark pattern, but this is one of the many unsubscribe UIs that use double negatives to confuse the user.

"Do you want to NOT receive our emails? Yes/No"

🤔🤔🤔

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This is particularly sneaky: even though there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, notice that the link text is far darker than it is for my email. This means that while you notice the first link immediately, it takes a while to spot the "unsubscribe".

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After I made ONE purchase from Victoria’s Secret, I started being bombarded with emails every single day, often more than one! Finally today I got fed up with it and decided to unsubscribe. After staring at their email footer for a few minutes, I had to resort to searching in order to find the link. Can you spot it?

As if the dark patterns in their email marketing weren’t enough already, check out the second picture for what I got after clicking. Not only is the default option “fewer emails”, I also have to enter my email again to make it even harder, especially for people with multiple emails which might not even remember which one they used.

Evilness rating: 9/10

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“after I clicked a very small unsubscribe link at the very bottom of a spam email…”

Submitted by cigix 

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“NCAA email out of the blue. Pretty sure it’s been 10+ years since I’ve had any interaction with them. Also kind of think that I’ve unsub'ed multiple times over the years.”

Submitted by Ben F

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Pizza Express email footer.

Submitted by Marcus TUcker

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You have to sign up for the site in order to unsubscribe. If you go to edit your notification settings instead, it takes you to a sign up page.

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This is what happens after I click "Unsubscribe" on some random spam from a recruiter. LOL, nice try.

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Submitted by Melanie.

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Submitted by Chiara:

“Nothing to see there :( 

It’s incredible how creative designers have to get to “hide” that link… Actually it seems like it’s a very difficult challenge and sometimes they just decide to remove it!”

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Note how the unsubscribe link is even grayed out, to make it way less noticeable than all the Amazon.com links. Nice one, Amazon.

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I have no idea where the unsubscribe link is here, and I suspect it has nothing to do with my not speaking French.

Submitted by Jean-Baptiste.

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“The “Unsubscribe” link is there on the bottom, trying hard to look like it’s not a link. At least it’s in boldface…”

Submitted by Henry.

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“I would like to add this promo email from Great Northern / Thamelinks, a UK railway company, to this already shining collection of great email designs.

Apparently in the UK, to remotely remove an entry from a database, you need to hand write a request and send it off via carrier pigeon to the database viscount - who’s personally going to remove your email from the database archive-thingy, and this why it might take up to 21 days to take effect.”

This must be one of the worst ones. Both hard to find unsubscribe link (lots of tiny, low-contrast text) AND it takes almost a month for them to stop sending you emails! Ridiculous.

Submitted by Hugo Magalhaes.

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“Invisible unsubscribe (by www.myopportunity.com)”

At least it’s more visible than some other unsubscribe links.

Submitted by Malte.

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”Not really sure if this unsubscribe link was ‘hidden’ enough for Spot the Unsubscribe!

I won’t lie, it took me a second to find. It was in pretty small font size.

I don’t know why I was signed up for AE Outfitters anyway- I never signed up for their email list..”

Sure, it’s not among the worst of cases, but it’s still a wall of tiny, low-contrast text that the user has to scan to find the unsubscribe link. Needle in a haystack comes to mind.

Submitted by Mazzen Awad

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“The unsubscribe button is actually disabled by design! Outrageous. I was able to work around this via the browser developer tools. But I wonder how many people just click it a dozen times and then abandon all hope?”

Submitted by Gregg.