If you have a minute, give me your opinion on this as a comment below (or email me at halbergj @ gmail) - it'd be REALLY appreciated.
As most of you probably know I work for a website called Seeking Alpha. Our most popular (and free) service we offer is the ability to receive our posts (you configure which you want) in your email box. Many people like it as it saves the time of checking the site frequently while also ensuring that you don't miss anything that you're interested in.
Since all of our content is free without any account setup there are really only a few reasons to actually sign up and give us your email address. 65% of our users signup because they want to receive email. 2% because they only want to comment. and the remaining 33% because... we don't know.
Our assumption is that the majority of that 33% were looking to receive email and we failed to provide it to them. They were lost somewhere in the process because we just didn't make things obvious enough - or a link we send them didn't work - or something along those lines. We're also sure that some amount of those users signed up "just because" - maybe they wanted to see if they got anything extra for doing it (they don't) or they just were really bored and did it for entertainment (sad statement on their social life!).
Our dilemma is that adding all these people as customers of our (free) service would mean a lot to us. It would boost our traffic and just make us feel like we didn't let them down when they were looking for our service.
Finally I get to the question I need your input on:
We are considering sending all of these people an email letting them know:
1. We are very sorry if you're receiving this email and don't want it. The letter would make every effort to let people know that we are not trying to spam them, but are trying to give them a service we believe they wanted in the first place. The letter would include a personal email address and phone number - something a spammer would obviously never do, as well as a single-click link to say "I never want to hear from you guys again".
2. The letter would let them know that we are going to begin sending them one email per day containing the headlines from our site. They will never receive more than one email per day and (again) with one click they can always opt out.
Pros and Cons:
Pro side for us: We get a bunch of new subscribers. We would, of course, expect many of them to immediately opt out - but we certainly would gain at least some of these people. After "the dust has settled" this would also answer a question we've been spending A LOT of time thinking about: Has poor usability been causing a very large percentage of our users to not get the service they desire? ... we think that looking at the percentage of users who immediately unsubscribe vs. continue to use the service will go a long way to answering that question.
The pro from the users side: If you are someone who genuinely wanted this service but didn't get it hooked up the first time - you'll being receiving one email per day that you consider valuable and you can go out and change your settings if you like (to only receive a subset of headlines for example).
The down side from the users side: If you really didn't want to hear from us: you received email from us (probably 2) that you didn't want. You may consider this 'spam' as you didn't specifically request this email. If you do feel this way it will probably be compounded by the fact that you've been signed up to receive one of these everyday.
The down side for us: Some people may feel as described in the last paragraph.
A few final puzzle pieces:
Every person we send to will have entered their email address into our site at some point. At that point they received an email saying they needed to confirm: and they DID then confirm (they "double opted in"). So, they DID quite deliberately "sign up for Seeking Alpha" - They just never actually utilized any of our services after that point.
Every person we send to will have never subscribed (we will not send to anyone who has subscribed at some point but unsubscribed).
What do you think? I am REALLY interested in hearing what everyone has to say about this...
** Update: I'm going to post comments I receive via email here anonymously. Obviously, if you give me anything that makes you recognizable I'll either omit it or clear it with you first... just want to get the conversation here going a bit though.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
17 comments:
My two cents is I think you're fine sending it. Anyone who signs up for this type of thing, is likely getting @ssloads of spam anyway. When I get 100+ spam messages a day to my yahoo account, I don't notice 1 or 2 more. Plus, from a business perspective, the people that get annoyed are likely to opt out, and aren't your customers, so if they're insanely angry about this "unsolicited email", big deal (unlikely anyway, but). Its a reasonable price to pay regardless if you can grow your customer base. Its a little "telemarkety", but I don't have a better suggestion to getting the word out.
As far as fairness-to-users is concerned, Jim, I'd say your asses are
karmically covered. As you mentioned, these people double-opted in, so
they do want to have some sort of relationship with Seeking Alpha.
The only weirdness I see is in the hangtime on your end: It may be a
little strange to finally be receiving something that they may well have
entirely forgotten about having wanted, so you need to remind them of
that as clearly as possible. Do that and you're golden, in my opinion.
Send an e-mail to the 33% asking them the question and offer two responses:
1) Yes, I would like to receive daily headline updates from Seeking Alpha
2) No, I would not like to receive daily updates from Seeking Alpha at this time.
I think that's the best option. I'd say go for it if it was a weekly email, but a daily email is just too much to make the assumption that people meant to sign up the first time. At least with the above email, you could probably knock that 33% down to 20% or 25% with the responses.
Maybe it would be less imposing to just send an email that says something like: we notice that you have signed up and have not been active on the site or whatever and then offer a link if you would like to receive emails in the future and repeat what the services are and how they would benefit, etc. Then you aren't sending them a daily email. I don't know.
Go ahead and send it. They gave you their dag-burned email address for goodness sakes. I think it is a very logical step to service someone.
I think it's a very good idea to send something out to try and make sure those who signed up have another chance. These days, people look at subject lines and will notice your company and decide whether or not to read or delete it.
Given the fact that everyone had registered for this at some point in time, you're way in the clear to send another message on this. But - hopefully you have the bugs worked out (or whatever you think was causing problems is now fixed). Because, this is pretty much the one chance you have. Obviously, you don't want to have to send out another one of these.
If I had double opted-in for something, and then never got anything that I signed up for, I'd probably like getting the email you are considering sending, and then as a result, whatever subscription I wanted.
I personally would also answer the reason question Nate suggested. I know the majority of people wouldn't, but I always do.
And finally, I agree with Anonymous that one extra spam mail won't matter. I don't even see spam messages anymore, and currently there are 1,376 messages (not kidding) in my spam folder. I definitely wouldn't notice another 50, much less one or two.
I say send it. They gave you an email address after all, and you've indictated that you're not just sending the message to everyone on your list (not to people who unsubscribed, etc). Send away!
I don't think I would be upset.
I get a daily email from Buy.com.
I ordered something from them a long time ago.
If the subject has something that catches my eye, I open it.
If not, I delete immediately and think nothing of it.
Will I unsubscribe? Probably at some point.
But that is a lot of work too.
Additionally, if you do have an unsubscribe link, I recommend doing
everything you can to make that page take a long time to load.
A number of times I have continued getting emails only because the times
I had clicked on the unsubscribe link had taken so long to load that I
just said eff it.
I strongly disagree with making it difficult to unsubscribe. If you don't want to make someone angry by sending too many emails, why make them angrier when they can't easily opt-out?
I'm with most of the comments above. You are fine to start sending the emails. I don't see a real issue here.
I agree with the rest. As long as your email isn't evil, it's ok to send it.
My concern is how will you prevent this situation from happening again in the future (if you haven't already). You could force the user to explicitly sign up for a particular subscription, or else choose "I don't want these kind of emails."
Send the email. They did express interest.
Explain that your email is in response to their request for information from SeekAlpha.com. Stating this in the subject line is best.
Make it clear you have a privacy policy to protect them. Include a summary or a link, at least.
Ask them to update their on-line profile. This can make great sense if you’ve added new features or subject areas, as they would not have had a chance to subscribe to the same information the first time.
Briefly explain the benefits of subscribing to your site and general site features. They may not have been to your site recently, here’s your chance to refresh their memory and point out any recently added features.
Make your opt-out instructions (or link) clear and easy to use. Again, these folks may no longer be interested, and if they still don’t want to subscribe, don’t make them upset. If you don’t make them mad, they may still mention your site to a friend.
Provide an easy way for them to provide comments or feedback on the email and the site. You may learn why they had trouble completing their subscription, or you may learn what they found lacking in your site. Even if they don’t send you a comment, one major complaint from customers – on-line or in-store – is they want to be heard when they find service below par. Sometimes just providing the means for feedback will make the customer feel your organization cares about them: Always a great marketing advantage.
By the way, I get emails like this from several sites, periodically. The emails come from companies like IBM, Forrester Research, and other technical search sites.
You haven't really properly represented the situation here.
People have _not_ truly opted in to receiving a daily digest email. To do that, you go to the account page and click "Give me the daily digest" -- simply signing up for an account is NOT the same thing.
This is comparable to signing up for a google group, but then never signing up to receive the messages from the group to your email. Until you go to the account page and click "Send me the messages everyday!", you haven't opted in. You've just verified an account and your email address.
Also, making it difficult to unsubscribe is not only unethical and stupid, it is also illegal in some areas.
re: "You haven't really properly represented the situation here." from Rob
I went out of my way to explain that people signed up only for the site and that we don't know why those 33% of the people didn't elect for any services (including digest mode).
I really like the idea of sending an e-mail saying...Hey great you singed up.. We are checking in because we noticed you are not active. Do you want us to keep your account active? Do you want some e-mails? Check out these great new features.. Blah blah blah.
I know I have signed up for lots of sites and forgotten about them by now. My personal opinion is that it would be helpful to your target audience.
Post a Comment