It’s The Little Things

We talk all the time about customer obsession, it’s the first amongst equals of our Leadership Principles. The general idea is that you always imagine the customer is in the room with you when making decisions, and consider their preferences when implementing a feature.

As email got more prevalent (and with it, junk emails), one feature that came along in the spirit of customer obsession was one-click unsubscribe. Me being a person who strives for inbox zero, stopping email subscriptions easily was a welcomed capability. But who knew it could be done even better. Behold, zero-click unsubscribe:

How cool is that? Recognizing that I haven’t interacted with any of their emails or visited their site, they automatically unsubscribed me from their lists. That’s customer obsession in a nutshell.

The really surprising thing about this capability is that it’s surely dirt simple to implement. I bet I could pseudo-code it off the top of my head in one minute. Ready, go!

all_emails = database.get_mailing_list()
for email_address in all_emails:
last_contact = database.get_last_contact(email_address)
if datetime.today() - last_contact > ONE_YEAR:
database.remove(email_address)

See how easy that was? Any marketing email system worth its salt already knows when you click on a link in any of their mailings, so the data is there. Just takes a company thinking more about their customers than the size of their distro.