Two weeks ago, I found several emails that I hadn’t gotten earlier that were almost a week old from prospective clients. It made me wonder what other important business I was missing.
When realized that I was getting over 100 emails everyday, many of them email newsletters I decided to take my time back. Rather than spend time reading email, I thought I’d move my favorite websites to my RSS reader, bookmark those websites I wanted to look at again but maybe not hear from frequently, and unsubscribe from almost every email newsletter I get. Here’s what I learned:
I’m not telling you about compliance to be a jerkface. I’m letting you know because I was doing something illegal, I’d hope you’d tell me.
By law, any email newsletter has to have a one click unsubscribe among several other things. That’s right, there’s actually laws governing email newsletter sends by companies. Any newsletter I saw in violation of this, I let the owner of the newsletter know about the CAN-SPAM laws and asked politely for them to unsubscribe me. If I got an email newsletter from the same company again, I marked it as spam. Out of the twentyish people I wrote to, I got back one ‘thanks for letting me know’ which caused me to bookmark that website. I wasn’t saying it to be mean, really!
If you send multiple emails a week, don’t let it be all or nothing.
Many larger companies send at least one email newsletter a week. When I got to their unsubscribe page, they mentioned something to the effect of ‘we have a weekly summary email if you want to keep in touch’. Giving someone like me a weekly or monthly option may allow us to reconsider.
Don’t make it confusing to unsubscribe. It makes me think you’re trying to trick me.
One email newsletter had some double negatives going on in a way that I had to read the page very carefully to make sure I had actually unsubscribed. That site did not make my bookmark or RSS list because I felt like they were trying to pull one over on me.
Please have an RSS feed.
Several websites that seemed prominent enough (publications) did not have an RSS feed on their site. This made me think of a couple things:
1) Wow, these people are too low tech to know what an RSS feed is. (Aside: I get that some people wouldn’t know what an RSS feed is but if you publish things you want people to read online, you should.)
2) Wow, they don’t want to give anything away for free in terms of content (they want to make me go to their website for everything).
Listen, for item number two, you can just have the RSS feed be partial (making someone click to read the entire post) if you really want people to get to your site but honestly, who cares how people get the info as long as they’re reading? Oh and you can put ads in your RSS feed if you want to make money anyway. In other words, no excuses not to have one.
Give me other options besides email.
On the unsubscribe page, you can tell me you’re sorry to see me go yet urge me to stay in touch other ways, like Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feed. Just because I don’t want to get email from you doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from you at all. I’m not dumping you, I swear!
So two weeks later, my email seems much more manageable so far. Who knows, I might resubscribe to some newsletters but at least this will give me a chance to miss them.
Your turn my email loving friends: What’s your favorite email newsletter to get? And what do some businesses do in their email newsletters that drives you nuts?