Like most people these days I have more than one email account. It helps me find and respond to important emails faster if I reserve an email box just for newsletters. This morning I logged into my newsletter mail box to find over 100 emails. There’s no way I was going to give 100 emails my full attention. So I started to clean house and unsubscribed from the newsletters that I routinely skip.
Most of the companies gave me a confirmation message on their site. A few of them sent me a confirmation email. (Which I save because I am a nerd and like to send the confirmations back to them when something happens and they suddenly start emailing me again.) Several of the newsletters I skip are different variations on a theme. For example: when you subscribe to a newspaper newsletter they often give you a choice of which sections of the paper you would like to receive, along with breaking news and maybe a few local options.
One of these organizations gave me a lovely page where I could unsubscribe from any and/or all of their newsletters. Which I did. Then they did this:
They gave me one place to unsubscribe and then they further cluttered my inbox by sending a confirmation for every single message I declined. I appreciate their dedication to making sure that I know they know I unsubscribed and they are following the necessary protocol. But if they can come up with one master unsub page, they can come up with one master confirmation email as well.
This is a bad habit a lot of companies fall into. As emails get added to the marketing mix, the subscribe/unsubscribe pages are updated. But the auto-responders aren’t. Don’t do this! The technology we have today makes it easy to update your auto-responders pretty quickly. Failure to do this shows a lack of attention to detail in your company and will annoy your customers and prospects.
Add a note to your task list: when you’re updating one portion of your site or functionality, make sure you review the entire process from top to bottom. Not only will it keep everything current, it will make you look like the professional that you are.
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