I feel as if I am just NEVER going to get the hang of scheduling appointments. I am continually looking at the calendar and thinking, “Oh…wait. William has a doctor appointment at the same time as Rob’s piano lesson and also that’s when the little kids’ bus gets here.” I think it’s one of the reasons I dread calling to make appointments: I just know I’m giving myself a little pocket of trouble for the future.
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I talked a little about this on Twitter but now let’s talk about it here. The Children’s Place is one of my favorite places to buy clothes for the kids. I WANT to receive emails from them. I signed up for those emails ON PURPOSE. But they started sending 3-4 emails PER DAY, and that is KRAZY. I followed the unsubscribe link, because sometimes that leads to a place where you can choose to receive fewer emails, but no: it’s either MANY EMAILS A DAY or NONE.
So I emailed them. I asked if this situation could be changed. I explained it the way I explained it just now: I WANT emails, just not so MANY. I don’t WANT to unsubscribe; I WANT to be marketed to. I got an email back: they suggested I follow the unsubscribe link and choose to receive fewer emails. I checked that link again, to see if they’d changed the options since I last checked, but no: it’s still all or nothing. I emailed back; there has been no reply. I followed the unsubscribe link and unsubscribed.
Gymboree recently followed the same pattern. They were sending a couple emails a week, and I was good with that. Then recently I noticed it had crept up and I was routinely getting several a day. I did the same procedure: checked to see if there was a way to reduce frequency, then emailed the company. They sent an email thanking me for my input; I unsubscribed.
This seems BEYOND stupid to me, from a marketing/PR standpoint. Why would a company take the people who are ASKING TO BE MARKETED TO (and then RESPONDING with outlays of MONEY), and alienate them by extremely overdoing it? This is not a matter of “I wonder if the customers would respond better to one email a week or two emails a week?”: NO ONE IN THE WORLD could possibly think a customer would want 3-4 emails a day. Seriously: NO ONE. And yet here we are.
This is goose that lays the golden egg stuff: if they would send one email a week, I would love it and give them more money than if they sent zero emails a week; when they send four a day, they lose that marketing path completely.
Edit: Just heard back from my SECOND email to Children’s Place, the one where I thanked them for their advice about reducing frequency, but that the link they’re talking about actually leads to an all-or-nothing subscribe/unsubscribe option, not to a reduce-frequency option. Their reply: Explaining that I can find the link at the bottom of emails from Children’s Place. I VERY NEARLY screamed with frustration.
Yes! This!
Are all the emails trying to sell you the same thing? It could be that the ‘order’ to send each email to the mailing list could come from different departments who don’t talk to each other, and no one has realised the end customer is getting bombarded with emails. This kind of thing used to happen a lot in my ex-workplace.
How very responsible of you to email them and give them the chance to continue marketing to you! And how very dumb of them, as you said, to not have a way to accommodate you. I got fed up with all of the emails too and ultimately created a new “junk” email account that doesn’t sync to my phone so that I still get the emails and coupons, but I only go to get them when I’m looking to shop for something in particular. So the shops are still getting my business, but not from their “QUICK! 50% OFF SALE TODAY” subject lines because I’m not checking it daily.
I have been methodically unsubscribing to every. single. place. that emails me, because there does not appear to be a happy medium. (The one exception I’ve found is actually Michaels, which respects the “no more than 1x/week” frequency – which they provide as an option to choose!) For everyone else, I’ve decided the frequency with which I would buy from them is FAR FAR LESS than the a) frequency with which they email me, and 2) the payoff of saving $10 on the rare occasion i do use an email promotion, so NOPE UNSUBSCRIBE FOREVER.
My new plan is that if I know i want to buy something (like a new photo album for vacation photos from one of those photo printing places) I’ll sign up and wait 1-2 weeks for the proper promotion to present itself, and buy then. And then re-unsubscribe.
I cannot deal with the zillions of emails a day from the same retailer. I ended up using Unroll Me, so now all sale/marketing emails go into a specific folder without my having to see them. This way, when I need a sale code, I can look for one, but I don’t have to be aggravated by the flood into my inbox every single day (looking at you, Land’s End). A few still slip through the cracks, but on the whole I get about 80% fewer emails per day and it keeps me slightly more sane.
I came here to recommend Unroll.me as well! Major sanity-saver, and SO easy to set up and use.
I think the Gmail Promotions folder may have made things worse to some degree, because so many people are now rarely seeing, much less opening, promo emails, and companies may feel that the more they send, the better chance one will even be opened. I see my mom’s email, with thousands of unread things sitting right in her inbox (SRSLY), and it makes me realize that some people think of email a lot differently than I do.
Ah, that’s an interesting point. I was going to say that for me, the promotions tab has made things BETTER – I can let them build up for a couple days, then do a mass-deletion without having to sift through them. OR, I can browse through them if I’m interested. But yeah, from the retailers’ perspective, it’s probably HARDER to have emails read that way.
I feel like consumer confidence is LOW when shopping. I ran to Old Navy to look for Easter outfits. They had some, I needed them that day for a family photo. No promos online. The next day, I get an email for 30% off entire purchase. Grrrrr. So now I have to go back and get a price adjustment, and since that promo for 30% off, it’s now 40% off! I just am not confident buying unless it’s 30%+ off.
I also go to retailmenot to grab a coupon code or printable coupon prior to shopping. I also use ebates, so I like to feel like I’m getting a good deal, earning money (granted 2% cash back is not much, but it’s something) and also saving money.
SO YES. Everything you said. Also, could they at least acknowledge it’s a great idea? I would give SO much credit to a company that said “oh, yeah, we totally get it. we’re working on giving you an option for less emails, hang in there.”
I feel the same way about scheduling appointments and I really only have my own schedule to consider. And when I’m making the appointment and they give me a few different options I feel it takes me forever to decide which would work best, and then I always make the wrong choice anyway.
I get so many emails from Old Navy that it’s now a joke. Every day, there is an email telling me that it’s the final day of some sale. I now can’t shop at Old Navy because I can’t handle keeping track of what is or isn’t on sale. (I don’t like shopping. My son is almost out of pyjamas that fit, and my extremely rational response is to sew them myself).
I have never managed to schedule an appointment that doesn’t conflict with something. I now just assume it will and happily make the appointment, confident that I am messing everything up. It usually works out in the end.
I do all of my online shopping in one (or two) of my cats’ email accounts. They don’t seem to mind the spam ads. And they don’t mind me looking at their email if I am looking for a coupon.
Lol I love this!
I also like the Gmail Promos folder.
For those that don’t have gmail, I’d create a “shopping” folder and filter all promo emails to that. Doesn’t solve the problem, but you still have coupon if/when you need them.
I agree that once a week is the perfect frequency for me to be really happy that I’m being sold to. Maybe twice, even! But daily or more and I just glaze over.
I agree completely! And one of the most frustrating things is that I work for an organization that Will.Not.Offer.This. (Thankfully, we do take pains to never send more than 1 message/day during the busiest times, and a lot fewer during the rest of the year, but still. Not offering the option of a reduced frequency is ABSURD.)
We’re a nonprofit, so some of the considerations are different. We can’t control when a bad bill is going to get voted on, for example. But apparently the rest of my office just doesn’t get as annoyed by spamminess as I do, because it’s not something that’s ever gained traction when I’ve tried to push for it.
So THANK YOU for emailing about this – the only way I know I’ll ever be able to convince my bosses about the need for it is for people other than me to point out how annoying it is.
May I presume to point out that if email frequency is something *your* organization controls (that is, you decide how often to email people and don’t give them control over this — obviously you cannot control whether they filter/read the emails) that you have, here, a perfectly good opportunity for a research project? Use Excel (or something similar) and randomize your emailing list into two subsets, and email one group with X frequency and the other with Y frequency. Then — this assumes there is *something* about your recipients’ behavior you can track (at the individual level, not just in the aggregate), which may not be correct, but — opening of emails? making of contributions? attendance at events? — see which group does “what you want” with more frequency. You could of course even survey them, but the cheap way to do surveys would be online and — emailing people to solicit response to a questionnaire about how they respond to emails is likely to produce, um, a biased sample. So.
I’ve also found Unroll.me to be very helpful. I also get 3-4 Children’s Place emails but I don’t have to see them in my inbox. I highly recommend it!
OMG I had to do that with Lands End, it was 6-8 A DAY and thats crazy–I WANT to spend money with them, I WANT to know when the sales are but had to finally opt out-I emailed them and said I’d be happier receiving 1-3 emails a week. I also let them know I’d actually PREFER if they’d pack and mail my order the same day so it would get to me much more quickly rather than waiting 24 hours to see if I might want to amend my order by adding more items…they politely ignored me after saying thank you for your response…UGH!!
I’m annoyed too by the too-frequent emails, just as I am annoyed by paper catalogs that I have to unsubscribe from every time I place an order.
I just want to point out that most of these large companies are using (read: would be complete idiots for not using) some sort of tracking program for these email messages. (M@rketo/Eloqu@/P@rdot or the like. (@=a))
So they probably know what’s improving sales and what isn’t, what links are being clicks and which aren’t, who is unsubscribing and who isn’t, etc.. basically they know how much time you spent on their website, where you went and how much you bought based on the email you opened.
This leads me to the conclusion that there are people who this works on. Or, the constant stream of emails improves the likelihood of catching someone on their ‘right’ buying day. (Many more someones.) Or, it allows them to do these mini/flash/limited time sales that increase impulse buys. Or, it is worth it to them just to keep their name passing in front of your eyes on a daily basis.
“I just know I’m giving myself a little pocket of trouble for the future.” Perfect way to describe it.