email marketing

I Feel Guilty About Unsubscribing from Email Newsletters I Never Read

Ashlee

It shouldn’t be so hard to unsubcribe, but it is.

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I feel guilty about unsubscribing from email newsletters.

Do you ever feel that way?

You’re checking your personal email account & there’s this one newsletter you just skip over when you see it. Like, it doesn’t even register in your mind when they email you anymore. Your eyes just skip past like it’s not even there at all.

One day, you realize you have a lot of unread emails. You take a closer look at them & see The Newsletter.

“Oh, I forgot I receive their emails still. Boy, there sure are a lot of them. All of them are unread.”

“When was the last time I opened one?”

Sometimes you only pay notice because the sender sends you one of those “Hey, let me know if you still want to receive my emails” emails, which typically inform you it’s been like a year since you even OPENED one, much less read it.

Or it’s a newsletter that has good information that has helped you in the past. Sure, you might open them, but you always make them unread without reading them so you can read them at some point in the future.

You say to yourself,

“There’s at least a hundred of these clogging up my inbox! I have 3,052 unread emails, but I feel like none of them are really important.”

You take a look at The Newsletter.

“Pretty boring. Why did I even sign up for it? Oh, that’s right. I got a free ebook if I did.”

You scroll down to the bottom to click the “unsubscribe” button. Should be pretty easy. You haven’t read The Newsletter in more than a year, the information is often mediocre, or maybe it’s a store you don’t really shop at.

But that’s when the sweat starts running down your face. Your finger or your cursor hovers, as uncertain as a chihuahua at an airport, over the unsubscribe button.

“But I LIKE supporting this company. If I’m not following them, this poor person is going to go out of business.” You say, if the email in question is the newsletter of a small business.

No, they won’t. You’re not doing them any favors by not reading their newsletter. All you’re doing is potentially costing them money if they have to pay for a certain number of subscribers, & making their send-to-open ratio a whole lot lower. If you’re not buying from them, & you never open their newsletter, you are not actually helping them, only feeling like you are. So unless it’s your mom’s business & you’re her only email subscriber, if you don’t open or ever buy from the newsletter, HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

“But SOMETIMES I learn something interesting.” You say, if the newsletter in question is informative.

Yes, you might. BUT ONLY IF YOU OPEN AND READ IT. You are literally learning nothing by staying subscribed to a newsletter you never read. NADA. So here, you must face a choice: either begin opening & READING these emails so you can learn what you should have been learning anyways, or HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

“But sometimes they have good coupons! I don’t want to miss out on a sale. What if they have something I might want?” You say, looking at the marketing newsletter from a medium/large.

A classic case of FOMO. You don’t wanna unsubscribe from the Groupon newsletter because sometimes they have sales you want to take advantage of. FINE. But if you never open the newsletters or never use the coupons they send (NEWSFLASH: probably because you don’t actually like shopping there are much as you think you do), YOU ARE NOT HELPING YOURSELF OR THE COMPANY. Also, especially if it’s a large company, literally hundreds or even THOUSANDS of people might unsubscribe from it daily. To them, you’re just a number. They’re not going to go out of business because you unsubscribed. No tears will be shed in the marketing department when you HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

Moral of the story: if you never read it, never use it, or don’t need to use it, HIT THAT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON. No one who creates the newsletter is probably going to cry over you unsubscribing. There’s really no reason to feel guilty about unsubscribing.

And here’s the most magical part of all: if at some point in the future, you realize you miss the newsletter…

YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO IT AGAIN!

*cues balloons & confetti

And if you’re afraid of forgetting the newsletter, write down a list somewhere of what you have unsubscribed from.

You really have nothing to lose by unsubscribing. So how about you hit that unsubscribe button & experiment with not getting the newsletter, at least for a while.

Try unsubscribing. You might just like it.

Why I Unsubscribed From the Groupon Email Newsletter: An Open Letter

Ashlee
Groupon Newsletter Image

I signed up for Groupon a little before Thanksgiving. I knew people who got really good deals on it so I went to check it out, & I was impressed. They had some really, really good deals on things. I bought several Christmas presents from them. Even more interesting to me than the “Groupon Goods” was that Groupon sold were tickets/admissions to real-life experiences in my area. I found some amazing things I never would have thought to look up, & at great prices!

I love Groupon. I still do. I think it’s a great tool for finding cool experiences you can have in your area or somewhere you’re traveling, & getting a great deal on those experiences. It’s got some pretty nice discounts on things you might want to buy yourself or someone else for a gift. I love that it makes me aware of things I might want to do & experiences I might want to have.

BUT SERIOUSLY.

STOP EMAILING ME SO OFTEN.

I wouldn’t mind getting a Groupon newsletter. Getting deals sent to your inbox, making you aware of deals they have, & reminding me of Groupon’s existence are all very good things that I have no problem with.

But getting what seemed like 3+ emails EVERY SINGLE DAY from Groupon (or anyone) is just way too much noise. Even after Black Friday was done, they just wouldn’t stop emailing me. I get a lot of newsletters, & I don’t have time to read most of them. I don’t like being emailed constantly. I don’t like subscribing to a newsletter where as soon as an email arrives, it feels like a burden to read or something to frantically keep up with. If it starts feeling that way, there’s a 99% chance I’ll either delete all the emails as soon as they arrive or unsubscribe entirely.

There is a really easy solution to this. One that allows the brand to increase the amount I’ll spend with them, stop bothering me with emails, AND keep me as an email subscriber.

I had the same problem with Zulily a year or so ago. Zulily, the clothing-&-gift deal website, is kind of like Groupon — great deals, limited-time-offers, cool things to buy. But they also shared a penchant for sending me way too many emails. Minimum of once a day, there would be an email from Zulily. I started deleting the emails without even looking at them.

I was about to unsubscribe completely.

But Zulily had a nice little feature that I discovered on my way to unsubscribe.

You could choose how often Zulily emailed you. Once a day, once a week, or never. They also have a “Snooze” feature where you can keep your current settings but not receive any emails from them for 30 days.

Some email newsletters just piss you off because they send an obnoxious amount of emails & give you nothing in return. With those, you just want the emails to stop. With a newsletter like Zulily (or Groupon) that sends you good stuff but just emails too often, you’re willing to negotiate. You WANT to stay subscribed, you just don’t want constant emails.

I picked “Once a Week”, & Zulily has never annoyed me again. I have purchased way more stuff from them AFTER decreasing the frequency of emails than I would have if they kept emailing me every day, because then I would have unsubscribed completely & not thought about them very often.

When I started getting annoyed at how often Groupon emailed me, I clicked on the link at the bottom of the screen that said “change frequency of emails”. I thought, “Awesome, I can fix this like I did with Zulily!” I was excited & relieved. But to my disappointment, the only choices you had were to either unsubscribe completely, change the region the deals were for, or unsubscribe from individual types of newsletters, like Groupon Goods, Groupon Getaways, etc.

No option to change how many times PER WEEK I got an email. For any newsletter that sends out “daily deals”, I think this being able to opt out of just those & have control over the frequency of emails is essential.

With no other choice, I did what I had to do.

I unsubscribed from the Groupon newsletter.

I think a lot of brands are afraid that if you don’t get emails from them at least once a day that you’ll forget about them. If this is the reason these brands don’t offer an option to reduce how often you get an email, this doesn’t make any sense to me. Annoying me by constantly telling me about how many sales you have makes me LESS LIKELY to read ANY of the emails because I find it overwhelming, even if the content is good. I’m only going to spend my money when I WANT to spend my money.

I don’t like feeling like when a brand is pressuring me into impulse buying stuff I don’t want or need, rather than making meaningful purchases when I feel like it & developing a mutually respectful relationship with the brand.

If I unsubscribe, I have to manually go to the website & look for deals if I want to buy from them. I’m not going to do that, say, once a week, so I’d be seeing their stuff a bare minimum of 4X more if they gave me the option of only receiving an email weekly vs me unsubscribing altogether. Sure, I might miss some deals that I might have been interested in, but I’ll still buy way more stuff from the brand because I’ll still be subscribed to their newsletter.

Groupon, if you’re reading this, I will gladly re-subscribe to your newsletter once you offer an option to only be emailed weekly. I miss seeing what you have to offer!

BUT:

Marketing should be more like a mutually-beneficial conversation & less like someone shoving an ad in your face. I know you’re better than that, & I think the payoff you’ll get from giving your customers more email options will be more than worth any effort you would put into implementing this.