I recently had the pleasure of sorting through a long forgotten personal email inbox. In the last year, 5,683 emails had been delivered.

A couple of hours later I had cleared it out and unsubscribed from many of the organisations. This gave me quite a bit of time to think about these email campaigns. Possibly more time than the people who had sent them. I like to share so here are a few thoughts.

Firstly a quick calculation: 5,683 is more than 15 emails a day for a year to an address that no one has looked at. I didn’t appear to trigger any lapser programmes. What a missed opportunity to reignite a customer or clean the database.

I also found the unsubscribe process was often incredibly difficult. This is presumably to discourage people from leaving. But why would a company do that? If someone isn’t interested in hearing from you, then being as unhelpful as possible is unlikely to make them think fondly of your brand when they are next in market.

Finally, about 5-10% of the unsubscribe links simply didn’t work. They weren’t links or went to pages that didn’t exist. I know that checking links is dull but it is vital.

At AHK, we have been using email with our clients for more than 10 years. If you send out emails but would like to create a real programme, one that is more considered, planned and effective, then get in touch with David Hearn.