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.
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