You know what really frosts my flakes?
Having to unsubscribe from email categories instead of the emails themselves.
Apparently, businesses seem to have found a clever little loophole around anti-spam laws. They don’t put you on just one mailing list anymore. They create dozens of them.
They flood your inbox with junk, but when you click “unsubscribe,” you’re only removing yourself from one of dozens of different mailing lists.
I understand if a company wants to let me stop receiving emails about a specific event I am never going to attend while still getting updates about things I actually use or want.
But that’s not what’s happening anymore.
Now every coupon, every flash sale, every “last chance” offer and every “we miss you” message comes from a different category. The companies blast your inbox several times a day, then make you play a game of Whack-A-Mole trying to stop them.
I got an email from one company today and decided I’d had enough, so I clicked the unsubscribe link, only to discover they had 64 different categories of emails I could supposedly choose from.
At that point, the only sensible option was to unsubscribe from everything.
What marketing genius decided the best way to build customer loyalty was to bombard people with so many emails that they never want to hear from your company again?
Here’s a crazy idea. If your customers are trying that hard to unsubscribe, maybe the problem isn’t the unsubscribe button.
Maybe it’s the 15 emails you sent them this week.
I’m Grandpa Grumpy, and I’m way too old for this kind of nonsense.