• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 5, 2020

Most email opt-outs occurred on smartphones last year — at 74% versus 70% in 2018, with the remainder being done on desktops, according to an infographic released this week by OPTiZMO Technologies.

Don’t take this as a predictor of where and when opt-outs will take place: It reflects the opt-outs processed by one provider last year — and the year before. But it may serve as a snapshot of trendlines.  

That said, watch out for those Yahoo! clients — they accounted for 33.9% of opt-out activity in 2019.  

In contrast, Gmail generated 18%, having surpassed AOL for the number two spot. AOL pulled 11.1%, followed by Hotmail at 7.9% and Comcast with 3.5%.

Think of Monday as opt-out day — it had 16.2% of all unsubscribes. In one change YoY, Wednesday has supplanted Tuesday as the second-most active day, producing 15.4%  of all opt-outs vs.15% for the day before.

Saturday pulled the lowest percentage of opt-outs — at 12.4%. 

Late morning was the most popular time for opting out — from 11 a.m. to noon. Coming in second was the period from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and third was noon to 1 p.m.

In comparison, nighthawks aren’t that active — they accounted or the lowest percentages in 2019. 

As for operating systems, 52.9% of opt-outs took place on iOS, compared with 49% the year before. And 20.8% were conducted on Android, with 20.7% on Windows, 5.0% on Mac OS and 0.6% on all others.

Safari Mobile and Chrome slight declines in their opt-out rates in 2019, but still remained in the top two slots. However, less common browsers appeared more oaten than they did in 2018. The top opt-out browsers were:

• Safari Mobile — 50.9%
• Chrome — 26.4%
• Samsung — 5.4% 
• Edge — 4.8%
• Firefox — 3.3%
• Safari Desktop — 3.1%
• Internet Explorer — 2.0% 
• Other — 4.2% 

And geography? North America pulled 90.3%, with Europe at 7.1%, Oceana at 1.2% and Asia at 0.05%. In addition, Central America, South America and Africa each produced 0.2%, and the Caribbean and Middle East came in at 1% apiece. 

The U.S. percentage went rose 86% in 2018 to 89.2%, the remainder of the countries all pulling numbers in the low single digits.