I suggest that the next time a business, startup or not, tries to "lifecycle email" (yuck) you, don't unsubscribe - spam flag them. If some business people have such warped understanding of reality that they can't see spam when they send it, at least they can get penalized for it.
Much as I smiled a wry grin at this suggestion, I have to say, don't fucking do this. Be an adult: if you signed up for something, take the time to try and unsubscribe first. No way to unsubscribe? Unsubscribe doesn't work? Okay, now you should start flagging as spam.
Unsubscribing has the added benefit of being more direct, in a "hey, we spammed this guy with 4 emails in three days, then he suddenly unsubscribed", instead of going "why are we being marked as spam? our lists are completely opt-in!".
> the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.
I'm pretty sure that giving your e-mail is explicit permission and an unsubscribe link makes it still-revocable. That said I completely appreciate that emotionally it feel like spam, and I can't imagine why any business in their right mind would feel this was a good business practice.
Subscribing to messages should be explicitly opt-in, and in a bunch of countries is legally required to be opt-in. If I miss an opt-out checkbox, and you send a marketing email - that is spam by definition, if gmail decides to filter you out, then by all means it was the right thing to do; and if it was a local business, they would be fined for that.
I use (and suspect the GP does too) use something like the following definition:Spam is email you don't want - it doesn't matter if you signed up with a company or not if you don't want a particular email it is spam.
Now as a practical matter I tend to click unsubscribe if it exists, mostly because otherwise the spam filters quality drops too far, but I still consider it spam.
I have a hard time keeping track of which companies I actually want emails from and how many companies tricked me into signing up for email by defaulting the "Spam me with marketing" somewhere on the page I used to sign up. Especially if a company is inconsistent with emails (no emails for a year, then 5 in a week).
So, sometimes I just get sick of dealing with it and start marking things as spam.
Unsubscribing has the added benefit of being more direct, in a "hey, we spammed this guy with 4 emails in three days, then he suddenly unsubscribed", instead of going "why are we being marked as spam? our lists are completely opt-in!".
The answer to both of those questions is the same.
I don't appreciate getting bogged down in automated emails anymore than the next person, but that's one of the reasons I don't hand out my email address very often. People should really be careful who they give their email address to, and less websites should require an email address for anything but business and very obvious newsletters.
Sure. But at the same time, if the company intentionally requires a daily amount of attention from prospective customers, it is not entirely unfair if prospective customers occasionally cause some measure of inconvenience from the company. If you don't value my time, why should I value yours? Live by the sword, die by the sword.
http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/series/target-5/lis...
People aren't going to trust your email marketing when you spew out so much email that it appears to be unwanted. If you look like spam, you're going to be treated as such.
Every once and a while, people listen to what they're told.
Also, they may have signed up to find out more because they wanted to find out more right then. After they learned more, they no longer cared. Since they no longer cared and there was no presented way right then to indicate they don't care, they may look at further marketing emails as spam, especially when there is a lot of them and not a simple follow up 'we miss you' a couple of weeks later.
Just because you know you're not sending out spam, doesn't mean that what you are sending doesn't look like spam to the receiver.
That Google then turns around and treats my signal as an indication of the level of trustworthiness of the whole company, and then uses this level for other users is actually irritating to me. I'm just using the user interface in the most convenient manner to me. Yes, I should go and unsubscribe - but that's laborious, and clicking "Spam" isn't.
If I'm reading email on my phone I don't want to have to spend 30 seconds entering my email address or looking up the password for some account I haven't used in months. In the worst case I've lost my password or someone else has used my email address by mistake, and then I'm forced to find the password reset option, re-check my email, and change the password just to unsubscribe. By that point just clicking 'spam' and getting the email out of my inbox starts to sound like a good idea.
And that five seconds is a lowball estimate if the unsubscribe link is actually to a "manage your email notifications settings" page as is so common these days.
IMHO, unsubscribe links should take one click, and should be at the top of the message, clearly marked. Even if you accidentally click it, so what? Just have another link on the resulting unsubscribe page to immediately undo the unsubscribe. Also, having better support in mail clients for unsubscribe mechanisms (I know Mailman puts in a header with an unsubscribe link, clearly labelled), would be a good idea. I could even see spam handling systems getting a little more sophisticated (if they aren't already), and attempt to unsubscribe via methods in the email first, then if that same email address gets any more email from that source, autoblock it as spam.
And I don't care much for the company, I just want to use their services. I don't want their email barrage flooding my inbox. I shouldn't have to put up with it just because I'm an 'adult'. Spam is pretty much anything in my inbox that I didn't expect and don't want.
Anecdotally, most people aren't going to go through the couple or three clicks to unsubscribe. This is what spammers rely on.
"WAHH, my 1% OFF sale is soooo important that I want to make sure nobody misses it. Can we send it out on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday? NO??? Do you realize that you're KILLING our business?"
No. Everyone hates spam. Go away.
There are some (many?) legitimate cases where I will sign up for a service and forget about it. (Rackspace's onboarding email says it best: "Did you get a text message? Meeting invite? It's okay, here, finish signing up.")
If you sign up for Everlane, you do so because you are legitimately interested in buying new clothes. Fashion changes, and if they can keep me abreast of the latest and greatest, then I am getting value.
If I signed up for Weebly because I need to publish a website, but for whatever reason I drop off, maybe their prompting will prompt me to go ahead and finish my site so that I can show it off to my friends.
Of course, it's hard to know whether a customer will fall into one of those buckets, or "I just wanted to check out the site, leave me alone!"
Maybe it is analogous to dating: flirting with someone is okay if the other person reciprocates, otherwise it is "creepy."
You recognise that emails from a flash sales website are vastly different than those from a service you're trying out, right?
One is about "Hey, buy X and Y today!" and the other "Hey, here's a cool feature in the product you're trying out!"
Not all emails are born equal.
If many of Weebly's actual signups have a reaction similar to your Everlane reaction, something like "NEATO I'D FORGOTTEN I WANTED TO GET MY WEBSITE UP WITH THAT BENEFIT", then what's the problem?
We can all agree that different audiences will find a particular email more or less engaging. The same way we might say "mathematics is beautiful", is there any room for saying "that marketing campaign" or "the way they engaged with their customers" is elegant?
Email volume does matter. You can send too many emails and annoy your users.
The one thing they have correct is that aggressive subject lines are generally better at getting click-throughs than milder ones. "You'd be crazy to miss out on this" works better than "Check out our new product."
I used to work for a flash sales website, and whenever I told people about it, they'd uniformly say "Oh yeah, I've signed up for them! Way too many emails, can you make it stop?"
I'm sure the folks at Weebly have tested this (or maybe this poor unfortunate soul is part of some silly week-long A/B test to try and improve engagement.) But my personal experience says that Weebly needs to get smarter about how to engage.
More effective: Send someone a couple of welcome emails. Wait 4 weeks. Then send them a message. BAM, lots of engagement, because when you receive the email you say "Huh, this must be pretty exciting, I haven't heard from them in a while!"
Have you ever signed up for Everlane? Go do it and pay attention to the way they do onboarding and email marketing. They don't spam me, but when they do, I'm like "NEATO LET ME SEE YOUR NEW CASHMERE T-SHIRTS" because it seems like a rare opportunity to see a budding startup release a new product. It's all marketing but done in a way that doesn't suck horribly.