The trouble with email opt-outs – they are killing what’s left of email marketing

We had an employee recently depart our company and agreed to forward emails to the employee's personal email for 6 weeks. After 6 weeks the emails were then redirected to an address back at our company. I was assured by the former employee that the individual had opted out of newsletters and sea of emails they received on a daily basis (many, many emails), yet the deluge continued.

So I opted out on the employee’s behalf. That stemmed some of the tide but far from all of it. What began as a desire to simply stop the madness ended being a study in deception. I have come to realize that despite best practices being an easy email opt-out (most of the companies did have this procedure) there were a good number of companies that did not have an easy opt-out, and even more that ignored the opt-out request by continuing to send daily emails even after an acknowledgment was sent saying ‘sorry to see you go’. Those companies are not only breaking the law, they are taking down the medium day by day.

Our company supports email marketing to current customers as well as those would-be customers that have opted in to receive more information. We rarely use email as a customer acquisition tool. And for the Generation Y folks and Millennials email is a passé form of communication. It is seen as an irrelevant communication tool and my recent experience only goes to support that notion. And ask for an email address from someone and you are 6 times more likely to get it than to get access to their Facebook account. Pretty easy to see which is the more relevant communication.

What possible benefit could a charity, marketer, or anyone for that matter gain from continuing to send out emails to those that do not wish to receive them? Aggravating them? An unusual marketing tactic to be sure but I am hard pressed to think of any other reasons other than dishonesty, laziness or plain stupidity.

Email opt out should be obvious, easy and immediate. Those that are not doing so are just killing it for the rest of us.

Power Reviews are flying high

We have a fairly small company (www.YourCover.com) that has recently signed up for Power Reviews (www.powerreviews.com). The team brought this idea to me and I got very excited thinking that since we receive such positive customer feedback we are bound to benefit from being a part of Power Reviews.

In today’s (10/12/09) Wall Street Journal Geoffrey A. Fowler’s interesting article on the Business Solutions page notes (http://bit.ly/3tUjbx) that Drugstore.com and Diapers.com both feel they are better connecting their brand to consumers by using Power Reviews. The article also talked about creating ‘verified buyers’ who would have badges next to their reviews in order to add authenticity to their reports.

Amazon.com was the pioneer here but now product reviews are ubiquitous. Last week I noticed another article citing that reviewers in general are overwhelmingly positive – 4.3 out of 5 ‘stars’ is the average rating. But the article also went on and noted that one particular reviewer was going the other way and not throwing around platitudes of positivity when it came to different products he encountered. And that the trend was that reviewers would become harsher as time goes on. So it could be said that these are the salad days for product reviews.

Are product reviews a component of social networking? I say yes. Is there a risk in having negative reviews posted about your product? Absolutely. But there is even greater risk is an attempt to steer or manipulate the conversation. Not everyone will love your product and while deep down we all know that it is quite another thing to have someone publicly slam your product for all to see.

What we hope to learn from (hopefully) YourCover.com having an active Power Review flow is how we can make the product and service better for our present and future customers. Not every review will be positive – nor should it be if the conversation is truly genuine. Of course we hope and expect that most of the comments will be positive, (hey we’re not masochists here), and that we are able to learn from what people think about their experience with our site and products.

I suspect for companies using Power Reviews that there will be bogus reviews – both on the positive and negative side. This is why there are recommendations to tie reviewer’s comments to their Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn page. Then there would be background on the reviewer such that you will ‘know’ them better. After all then you are getting a recommendation from a known and ‘trusted’ resource.

The question I have is – why should these folks be trusted?