Why prevent me from re-subscribing?

This morning I unsubscribed from an email list and was warned that if I unsubscribed, I wouldn't be able to re-subscribe unless I first contacted their customer support.

When companies do weird things, I always try to figure out why. And most of the time, I find some convoluted logic behind even the most nonsensical policies.

But in this case, I'm stumped.

Where is the benefit to the company? How does it help them to make it hard for me to re-subscribe?

Comments

[Viki Nygaard]

I recently got the same message when I unsubscribed from an email newsletter. I think it's used as a scare tactic to keep you from unsubscribing. If it were a technical matter, the company should offer a simple explanation as to such. Personally, I found it to be a complete turn-off and I wouldn't re-subscribe if they paid me.

[Joshua Zader]

Occurs to me that it may be a simple technical limitation: Unsubscribing puts you on a do-not-mail list, from which you must be manually removed by an administrator.

And if you try to re-subscribe without an administrator's intervention, you can try and re-try but will never succeed because of this technical "feature" which prevents you from receiving anything you have indicted you might regard as spam.

Just guessing, though.

[Mathew Patterson]

Possibly they have a system in place that is meant to prevent people from being spammed if someone keeps adding them to a list?

With Campaign Monitor we have a suppression list for this kind of thing, but it does not prevent an individual from resubscribing, only an account owner from reimporting by accident.

[Mark Brownlow]

My guess is they hope the threat stops you from unsubscribing in the first place.

There is still a prevailing and mistaken belief in some quarters that the size of your list is what matters. That any subscriber is better than no subscriber.

The problem with "forcing" people to stay subscribed is that the "emotionally unsubscribed" reader never opens, reads, clicks. All they probably do is eventually hit the "report spam" button...