I love to shop online. It's quick, it's convenient, and whatever I buy comes straight to my house. It's nearly perfect.(Except more sites need to offer free shipping. I'm not paying more to ship something than the item costs.) In my internet shopping journey, I've signed up for newsletters and here is where my blog topic begins.
There are etailers out there who send me an email four or five days out of the week. It's ridiculous! These are not sites that tout their daily newsletter. I am signed up for one of those and I'm fine with that because I chose to get email from them that often. If I wanted, I could unsubscribe and get a weekly email from them instead. For right now, daily is good. From this one etailer.
But there are sites out there who don't know when to stop bugging me. I get an email saying: Sale This Week! Okay, awesome, but I don't need anything right now. The next day: Six More Days On Our Sale! A couple of days later: Four Days Left! And it continues, right down to: 12 Hours Left On Our Super Sale!
Please. I don't want to hear from you that often. I don't need a daily reminder that you are having a sale. You have a sale every week and every week I get bombarded by your emails. Stop.
I've unsubscribe from a bunch of newsletters that were bad. Deep Discount and Dragon Naturally Speaking aka Nuance are two that immediately come to mind. I couldn't take the frequency of their emails any longer and I was getting to the point where it made me mutter every time I received something from them.
There are a few more that I'd like to unsubscribe from, but don't because even though they're annoying the hell out of me, when I do want to buy, the email offers are too good not to have. Still, this only goes so far. At some point they'll tip me over the edge and I will quit. Once a week is more than enough, but even less than that would be better. Much better.
Some merchants get it right. Corel (the makers of WordPerfect, the best writing software ever) only send out emails when they have a new product coming out or for an occasional sale. Caribou Coffee is another that only sends out occasional newsletters.
The newsletters that come four or five times a week? I delete them without opening them 99.9% of the time. I know it's cheap for a business to send an email, but they send so many, that I ignore them most of the time. This is wasted time, effort, and money. And because of how annoying this is, they're eroding any good will I feel toward their business.
On the other hand, I open and check out every email Caribou Coffee sends because I know when I get one from them, they have something to share. They're not simply sending out an email for the sake of sending it. It makes a difference. Too bad more sellers don't get this.
I'd like to segue into a complaint about the newsletters I get that I never signed up for, but that's another topic and I think I've gone on long enough. But you know what? You send me a newsletter I didn't request and I tell Gmail you're spam. It's that simple.
