My #1 e-mail marketing pet peeve

So, as can be expected, I am signed up for a LOT of e-mail newsletters. Publishing one myself (which you can sign up for at the tzk website - I'm so good with the self-promotion I is!), I find it nice to see what others are doing in the e-mail marketing arena, and occasionally I like to get updates on things I've become interested in.

But after a while, you realize that my goodness, you have too much to READ lately. And some newsletters prove less interesting than others, or they lose their pertinance to my life over time. And in this case, I have no problems taking myself off the list - and maybe I'll even come back someday.

But every once in a while, when I take myself off a list, the list manager program the newsletter publisher is using does something incredibly annoying. In my inbox, after I update my preferences to let them know that I don't want to get any more e-mail from them, I GET ANOTHER E-MAIL FROM THEM asking me to go to their website and CONFIRM that I no longer want to receive their e-mail. In the case of this morning's deletion of the Boston Streetsweeper notices (because I no longer live on the streets they're telling me about, and haven't in almost a year), it was just the one e-mail. But in the case of one list I took myself off (for a nightclub running nights I'm not really interested in anymore), I received an e-mail asking me to confirm at the website, then ANOTHER e-mail confirming that I confirmed.

This is the thing with e-mail marketing: in certain cases, it's a good idea to have someone confirm that they want to receive your e-mail. It's an extra courtesy to them, and it keeps those annoying SPAM accusations at bay. Engineers really like to confirm e-mail subscriptions. Your average Joe Consumer typically doesn't. But I can't imagine ANYONE who would unsubscribe to a list and be pleased when they get another e-mail from the list they're unsubscribing to asking them to confirm that they DON'T want to receive your e-mail. Seriously - it's just bad karma all around.