Frequency and Relevance: Insight from Actual Recipients

Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC.
Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing.
Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence.
 

Huey:I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post.
Huey:About engagement, now that you mention it.
Laura:yes?
Huey:Why isn’t ‘engagement’ part of opting in? Why isn’t it a preference that the user can set?
• Stevecocks head
Huey:Having just now deleted the third LinkedIn email of the day, and previously gone on a f**king tear about Verizon-
Steve:Oh.
Steve:Yes.
Huey:Let’s look at organizations I interact with.
Huey:Facebook.
Steve:I get what you mean, but I don’t think “engagement” is the word. That’s more a metric than a choice.
Huey:I keep facebook open in a tab that’s near the top. And even when I’m KVMed into the other computer, Facebook is still live and scrolling on the computer I’m not using.
Huey:Why? Because Facebook has interesting things to tell me, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Huey:On the other hand: …how often do I need to hear from LinkedIn?
Huey:For me, once a month would be fine.
Huey:Not three f**king times a day, that’s for sure.
Steve:“Frequency” or something. “Things about your company I give a sh*t about”.
Huey:How often do I need to hear from Verizon?
Huey:How ’bout ‘Never’? Does ‘never’ work for you?
Huey:Seems to me that the business of capturing ‘engagement’ would be easier if the customer was engaged in the engagening.
Laura:Sadly, they don’t
Huey:“How often do you expect to hear from us?”
Laura:and linked in has a pretty extensive preference center
Laura:that lets you pick days or weeks or no mail
Laura:they don’t == users don’t engage with preference centers very much.
Huey:Honestly, LinkedIn haven’t annoyed me enough to go looking for it yet.
Steve:Linked-in doesn’t even have working unsub links.
Laura:and, yet, they’re pissing off some of their users by unsubbing people who don’t click on group links
Huey:On the other hand, if Verizon’s webpage had a button for “Kill all of you with a shovel”, I would write a bot that clicked that nonstop.
Steve:Click. Get challenged to log in. Log in. Get sent to page that doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe. Click around a bit. Find something mentioning email. Still no clue as to how to stop the f**king email.
Steve:(Feel free to use that quote)
Steve:When your recipients view you like that, every mail sent is a potential sales opportunity doused with gasoline and set on fire.
Huey:I would put out that fire.
Huey:By beating it vigorously with a shovel.
Huey:I’ve got a really nice six-foot oak-handled dirt spade that I could totally kill somebody with.
Huey:SEND ME A VERIZON SALESMAN.
Huey:…and if I sat down and thought about it for half an hour or so, I could probably come up with something coherent about engagement that didn’t include the vision of me clubbing a verizon salesbag to death with a shovel.
Huey:(which I’m guessing might be a deal-killer for the professional blog)
Steve:Nope. If it’s OK with you, I’m planning on taking this gentle chat and (after some light editing consisting moistly of s/f**king/f**king/) posting it tomorrow as “Insight from actual recipients”.
Huey:although I may still need to use the words “Seriously, Verizon: STFU and GTFO”.
Huey:Oh, very well then. Feel free to characterize me as a shovel-wielding homicidal maniac.
Laura:🙂
Steve:It’s Verizon. People will empathize.

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