Home > Uncategorized > Advising your customers to unsubscribe? Are you mad?

Advising your customers to unsubscribe? Are you mad?

October 20, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments

“OK, i will unsubscribe.  The rest of this email is free advice from someone who works in digital marketing.”

This is the beginning of a note i just wrote to Streetcar, the car sharing service. They had just advised me to unsubscribe from their newsletter because it was peppering me with the same content every issue.

“I am sorry that you are not finding the notification of our current offer useful, as that is our main promotion at the moment our Streetcar View emails are mainly focused on that … if you do not wish to be updated about this offer in the future the Streetcar View emails can be turned off using the link at the bottom of the message”

It’s amazingly poor strategy to advise your membership to unsubscribe from all future communications because of one poorly designed marketing campaign.
Imagine you created the idea for Streetcar. You’ve hired people to market it for you. You’ve created a campaign where you are sending the same offer over and over again. Your users are early adopters. They are renting cars by the hour. They’re intelligent. They work hard, their time is scarce. Once they’ve seen your offer in their email twice i know it. You don’t need to tell me 12 times or even three.
It’s like going into McDonald’s and asking for a burger:
Please may i have a Big Mac.
“Would you like fries with that?”
No, thanks.
“Would you like fries with that?”
Er, No.
“Would you like fries with that?”
No
“Would you like fries with that?”
No
“Would you like fries with that?”
No!
“OK. That’ll be £3.77.”
“Oh, next time, would you like fries with that?”
-Silence-
My advice:
Don’t tell customers to unsubscribe – you will kill your business
Amend your overbearing campaign to stop the planned spam coming out.
Next time create a better campaign that doesn’t spam your customers in the first place.
Categories: Uncategorized
  1. Dave Nattriss
    October 20, 2010 at 16:08
    Reply

    Spot on. Prevention is always better than cure (though not always quicker/cheaper).

    • hyuz
      November 13, 2010 at 12:59
      Reply

      Thanks Dave!

  2. Christen Bradley Farmer
    March 14, 2011 at 11:01
    Reply

    Dear SUBSCRIBER,

    Ok, so you want to unsubscribe… Are you REALLY sure? I mean you probably did not read half the stuff we sent you so far. There was really a lot of hot stuff in it, about 7 lines down. We fired the guy who wrote the other mails. He sucked at intros.

    So we’ll give you another chance, and if you still don’t like it after another 237 mails, then we can chat about your subscribing to our parallel site (easily much better stuff there…).

    Come on. You don’t want to give up on us already, do you?

    Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?

    -The Faceless Management

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a comment