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. |
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[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.