Every now and then, I let a retail cashier sign me up for the company marketing e-mail newsletter, mostly to see what they’re doing for e-mail marketing. OMG! I have to say that Books-a-Million (BAM!) has won an award with me today.

I decided, based on sheer volume of e-mail and the ease of ordering from Amazon, to unsubscribe from BAM’s mailing lists. You know how it’s supposed to go; there are standard practices: Click the unsubscribe link and you get a message, “You have been unsubscribed.” Easy-peasy. Not so with BAM.

Here is the footer of the last e-mail message I ever wanted to receive from BAM:

It says, "Click here, and you'll fill out a new e-mail message."

So, if I click on the link and a new message is supposed to open, that tells me that the code underneath must be:

<a href="mailto:unsubscribe@booksamillion.com">here</a>

…or something like that. No. It’s actually a link to:

http://xb1.booksamillion.com/list/unsubscribe.html?lui=etc,etc,etc...

When you click it, a new tab opens, and several minutes–minutes!–later you see:

Whose options are THESE???

…and so, I had to select “unsubscribe” from every little drop-down, for unintelligible mailing lists. It was easy, since I’d already decided I never wanted to receive anything from BAM again. And another several minutes later, the page confirmed thusly:

Oh, good. It worked...?

Now, there are too many things wrong with this scenario to list them all, so I shake my head and wonder: “Why would any developer build such a cryptic and horrible interface?–too awful to contemplate.

Books-a-Million, you have a serious problem in your e-mail marketing department. I hope you can track it down.

Postscript: Several HOURS later, I noticed that I had to click the “unsubscribe” button AGAIN to make it final. Sheesh!