Why can you sign up for an email list instantly but to unsubscribe it can take up to 10 days? Is there an actual technical reason or is it a sales tactic to try to make you reconsider?
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Worked as lead for a company that included email newsletters/advertising along with a “payment” and “store handling”.. all bundled up.
I specifically worked on the gateway and integrations with banks, but i touched the marketing a handful of times:
1) on unsub a job would fire to remove you, this ran every 15 min or so and would go through the queue.
2) even if you were removed, the campaigns already processed and scheduled would have your email in them.
3) given the insane volume we’d send, when a campaign was scheduled we’d have microservices proccess this, which means that the microservice would not make a call to the DB for your email, or’wed nuke the db with millions of calls for every campaign going out.
4) so, despite your email being removed from our DB, pending campaigns still had it.
5) pending campaigns might span the next 24 hours or so, we would not proccess them more than that in advance. Generally speaking only a few hours though, depending on volume (clients wanted email to go out at xx:xx sharp, so the scheduler would make sure all of it is ready to be sent then and not have to throttle itself for db lookups etc)
10 day thing — as others have said, to cover our ass. Sometimes emails would get stuck and be sent later etc.. we’d have you out within 2-3 hours usually, 24hrs worst case, but if we are allowed 10, why promisse less?
Fun Fact: when you unsub from an email, the requierment never stated it has to be from our SYSTEM. A lot of times when you unsub you’d unsub from the *list* by default, but from the whole system, youd have to work for it a bit to find it 😛
Also, although you unsub, there was never an implied rule that we had to delete your email or it was never enforced, emails were kept and sold off… we also had statistics on each email on how often you open and click on shit, the ones that did were worth way more.
Note: i detested these practices, hence why i rarely touched this system other than to integrate the efforts into the payment system/store. I have long quit that company. The marketing dept was absolute cancer and everything they tried to do was so anti-consumer it made me sick.. like hiding the button on upsells to make customers frustrated and just do it, or simply do it by accident.. (big green button Accept, small ass decline hidden somewhere, no X in the corner). Fake sales.. taking too long to checkout and thinking.. click now and get 20% off… Mouse going towards the right corner of the page.. “WAIT.. here’s a once in a lifetime offer”. Thinking youre buying this for 66% off.. nono.. it’s 3 payments.. but it’s not obvious. They would specifically send shit back and ask my team to revamp them because they were too easy to cancel, or to easy to opt out, or too easy to understand :(…
Protip: if the UI is confusing and convoluted, run. It’s by design.
I do not miss that job…
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