I recently received a marketing email from Etrade and my first instinct was to unsubscribe from their marketing list. As I was going through their unsubscribe flow, I noticed something that simultaneously made me laugh out loud and angered me a bit. Let’s start with the email itself:

Scrolling down to the bottom of the email, we see the all important and sought after unsubscribe section:

Interestingly enough, they don’t use the word unsubscribe — perhaps because they know that people are trained to look for this word and perhaps they don’t want me to unsubscribe. 😉 On clicking through, here is the page that made me laugh:

Here, the unsubscribe flow has selected the option to remain a subscriber by default! Now, this could be a case of the wrong radio button being selected due to a bug, but I’m inclined to believe that this is a product decision in order to reduce unsubscribes. While I understand the need to retain customers, this is a dishonest way to do so. The ideal experience would (1) have a clear “unsubscribe” link in the original email with the word “unsubscribe” and (2) make the default call to action on the landing page remain as unsubscribe while allowing the user an opportunity to opt out.