indie_preneur

You Work for Us, We Can Email You at Will.

11.2.2009

By indie_preneur

That’s basically the message I got after I had inquired about a corporate [promotional] email I received a month ago. There was nothing wrong with it really. It wasn’t sexual or offensive. And it shouldn’t have seemed spammy.

I say shouldn’t have because if they provided an opt-out function, then I’d have just unsubscribed. But there was no opt-out, no physical address, no reply-to address–therefore, it was spam to me.

The corporation in question owns a lot of service and product providing businesses, so it makes sense that they would want to offer these to their employees with a discount. What doesn’t make sense is the way this is handled. I hit reply in Outlook, and it had a generic address, but I figured this was better than nothing. I simply asked if they could include a way to unsubscribe from these future emails, as these were far from CAN-SPAM compliant. And then I waited. And waited some more.

Two weeks later I heard back. Bascially the answer was that since they owned these companies, CAN-SPAM didn’t matter and they’d be sending more emails in the coming weeks. I guess they couldn’t unsubscribe me either as I received another email this morning.

I guess what the big deal is maybe they do have the ’right’ to send these emails to me–but, like with all email marketing–why do so if it’s just going to bother / piss me off? If you take this approach to your own employees, what kind of experience can customers expect to receive?

To add salt to the wounds, the response was finished up with the old saying: Please disregard if not of interest. Amazing how prevalent the 90′s views of email marketing still exist–batch, blast, and such.

Any experience with this at other corporations?

Bonus–the best part the email I received back had a few communications included in it. The best being the forward of my original question: “Check this one out. I don’t know if I will even reply. I presume that rule about an “unsubscribe” doesn’t apply if we are sending internal communication =)”

I get the fact that I was a pain, and probably am nit picking, but if you’re going to make a snide remark like that, make sure to take it OUT of the reply…

Tags: CAN-SPAM, Design, email, web

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.