Unsubscribing to E-mails

A few days back, as I was unsubscribing to e-mails and newsletters, I noticed a pattern.

Product/service providing companies had an easy one-click or two-click option to opt out of subscription. It had a worn out interface, with very little similarity to their product UI. All they asked me was a discrete one word question — “Unsubscribe?”, with options of Yes and No.

However, blogs like Quora, Pinterest, Medium and even Facebook had multi-click opt-out options. On clicking the light-coloured, underlined, classic “Unsubsribe” option on the mail’s footer, I was either taken to a sub-page in their settings or a decent enough page, which asked me a comparatively elaborate question — Do you want to stop getting daily/weekly updates?

Having read Nir Eyal’s Hooked a few weeks earlier, I comprehended this situation with the concept of Triggers. For blogs, the major external triggers are E-mails and notifications; while you would mostly use the services when need be. Hence the difference in allowing users to not hear from the company occasionally.