There’s something about January that makes us want to clean. That shiny new calendar page appears, and suddenly we have no patience for the junk that snuck up and settled into last year’s cracks. So we tidy up the papers on our desks. We throw out all the clutter in our closets. And if we’re very, very smart, we clean up our email inboxes and unsubscribe to a bunch of mass-mailed crud.
Yes, email comes in many forms, and somewhere in between the devious and illegal spam and the stuff we need for work lies a vast expanse of
e-newsletters and other (mostly) junk.
Sometimes we get onto people’s mass email lists deliberately, having stumbled across an intriguing businessperson who seems to have something to say.
Sometimes we get onto these lists mistakenly, getting trapped in the web of “Please enter your email address” when we’re simply asking for information or ordering something online.
And often we get onto these lists because some peoples’ business models stink: They collect every email address they can get their weasel paws on, then they fire off constant inbox interruptions to remind us that we, too, can part with our hard-earned cash.
But no matter how we get onto these email lists, we often find that we want to get off. That’s when “unsubscribe” becomes our friend.
Often it’s tempting – and easy – to simply relegate unwanted mass emails into the junk mail folder, because that generally keeps them from mucking up the inbox. But there are at least a couple of good reasons to use the unsubscribe function instead.
First, automatically sending emails to the junk folder doesn’t entirely take them out of our way.
We usually need to give the junk folder a quick perusal before deleting its contents, or we risk missing messages that were sent there by mistake. So when unwanted emails get sent to junk, they still take up our time and add to our workload with pointless tasks.
And second, when we decline to unsubscribe to useless emails, we neglect to give their senders any feedback – and we miss an opportunity to … dare we hope? … make the email world a better place.
No, it’s not as if most of us are going to fill out an unsubscribe form with in-depth details like “Your newsletter started out strong, but now it’s just a re-hash of the same old stuff,” or “It’s annoying that you’re always in sales mode; I was hoping for some industry insights, instead.”
And even a die-hard word nerd is hard-pressed to say “Your write-ups are so sloppy and dull that I’ve now developed a negative image of your company” – although she might want to. (Ahem.)
But at least a little input, such as “Don’t need it” or “Too salesy” – or even the simple act of turning the newsletter away – tells senders “You’re mistaken if you think these emails are turning me into a prospect.”
And that’s something they need – and possibly want – to know, as they do a little clean-up of their own.
Nice article! I hate newsletters and other random emails crowding up my inbox. I've been unsubscribing for the last few days and it's looking better :)
Posted by: Web Design Muskegon | January 09, 2012 at 05:30 AM