Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC.
Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing.
Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence.
| Huey: | I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post. |
| Huey: | About engagement, now that you mention it. |
| Laura: | yes? |
| Huey: | Why isn’t ‘engagement’ part of opting in? Why isn’t it a preference that the user can set? |
| • Steve | cocks head |
| Huey: | Having just now deleted the third LinkedIn email of the day, and previously gone on a f**king tear about Verizon- |
| Steve: | Oh. |
| Steve: | Yes. |
| Huey: | Let’s look at organizations I interact with. |
| Huey: | Facebook. |
| Steve: | I get what you mean, but I don’t think “engagement” is the word. That’s more a metric than a choice. |
| Huey: | I keep facebook open in a tab that’s near the top. And even when I’m KVMed into the other computer, Facebook is still live and scrolling on the computer I’m not using. |
| Huey: | Why? Because Facebook has interesting things to tell me, on a minute-to-minute basis. |
| Huey: | On the other hand: …how often do I need to hear from LinkedIn? |
| Huey: | For me, once a month would be fine. |
| Huey: | Not three f**king times a day, that’s for sure. |
| Steve: | “Frequency” or something. “Things about your company I give a sh*t about”. |
| Huey: | How often do I need to hear from Verizon? |
| Huey: | How ’bout ‘Never’? Does ‘never’ work for you? |
| Huey: | Seems to me that the business of capturing ‘engagement’ would be easier if the customer was engaged in the engagening. |
| Laura: | Sadly, they don’t |
| Huey: | “How often do you expect to hear from us?” |
| Laura: | and linked in has a pretty extensive preference center |
| Laura: | that lets you pick days or weeks or no mail |
| Laura: | they don’t == users don’t engage with preference centers very much. |
| Huey: | Honestly, LinkedIn haven’t annoyed me enough to go looking for it yet. |
| Steve: | Linked-in doesn’t even have working unsub links. |
| Laura: | and, yet, they’re pissing off some of their users by unsubbing people who don’t click on group links |
| Huey: | On the other hand, if Verizon’s webpage had a button for “Kill all of you with a shovel”, I would write a bot that clicked that nonstop. |
| Steve: | Click. Get challenged to log in. Log in. Get sent to page that doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe. Click around a bit. Find something mentioning email. Still no clue as to how to stop the f**king email. |
| Steve: | (Feel free to use that quote) |
| Steve: | When your recipients view you like that, every mail sent is a potential sales opportunity doused with gasoline and set on fire. |
| Huey: | I would put out that fire. |
| Huey: | By beating it vigorously with a shovel. |
| Huey: | I’ve got a really nice six-foot oak-handled dirt spade that I could totally kill somebody with. |
| Huey: | SEND ME A VERIZON SALESMAN. |
| Huey: | …and if I sat down and thought about it for half an hour or so, I could probably come up with something coherent about engagement that didn’t include the vision of me clubbing a verizon salesbag to death with a shovel. |
| Huey: | (which I’m guessing might be a deal-killer for the professional blog) |
| Steve: | Nope. If it’s OK with you, I’m planning on taking this gentle chat and (after some light editing consisting moistly of s/f**king/f**king/) posting it tomorrow as “Insight from actual recipients”. |
| Huey: | although I may still need to use the words “Seriously, Verizon: STFU and GTFO”. |
| Huey: | Oh, very well then. Feel free to characterize me as a shovel-wielding homicidal maniac. |
| Laura: |  |
| Steve: | It’s Verizon. People will empathize. |
[APPLAUDING THE INIMITABLE HUEY!]
LinkedIn’s preference centre really is shit.
This just made me laugh out loud. Well done!
Unfortunately, I think too many people see signups as a numbers game and don’t want to do anything that would slow down or complicate that process. I do think allowing the user to set their preferred “frequency” is a great idea, and works well as part of a confirmed opt-in process.
Heck, if I see a “frequency” setting and can count on a company to respect what I tell them, even I will sometimes sign up for a newsletter. (Not often, mind you, but it has happened.)
Sales and marketing through email do not have to be hostile to the best interests or wishes of customers. They just often are. :/
Yesterday, I figured out why LinkedIn hasn’t made me upset: GMail has helpfully been filing almost all of their mail in the spam folder.
Perhaps I should go looking for their horrible preference center.