Another day I received a small, uninteresting newsletter I never signed up for, from a new company I never heard of. At the bottom of the message was a link to unsubscribe. I clicked, and was taken to a page saying this:


(The email supposedly unsubscribed wasn't mine.)

Let's count the ways this company damaged its reputation with this newsletter:

They didn't use permission marketing

Permission marketing is a term coined by Seth Godin to designate a form of marketing in which prospective customers first have to give explicit permission before they are sent a promotional message. This type of marketing allows advertisers to reach a more specific audience that may be more receptive to their product or service.

"By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message" Godin writes. "It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange."

They didn't take the time to write a compelling message

The newsletter they sent merely included an excerpt from a PR announcement. To read the rest, I would have to click the link provided in the message. No motivation whatsoever for people to actually care enough to click and read more.

They didn't test the unsubscribe option

What kind of reputation will be associated with a company that tells people that they can unsubscribe by clicking a link, only to take them to a page where they are told that another person has been "successfully unsubscribed"?

They didn't use security measures to protect subscribers from email harvesting

The unsubscribe routine not only wasn't working, but it also allowed me to repeatedly click the same link and see other people's emails addresses, one at a time, along with the message that the address was "successfully unsubscribed". If the unsubscription process is working, I must have unsubscribed 30 people before I finally reached my own email so I could get out of that list.


I'm sending the link to this post to the company that sent me the newsletter. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and do a better job in the future so people will actually enjoy receiving correspondence from them.