Black’s doesn’t know when to quit

This, to me, is a great case study in email marketing. A year or so ago, I had an enlargement made of a digital file through Black Photo. In order to do it over the web, I had to provide them with my email address.

Every once in a while, I’d get some kind of newsletter about some sale they were having, delete it, and never think about it again. In the past month, the company managed to step up their usual marketing incompetence and decided to spam the people on their mailing list almost every day for the past two weeks.

I ignored the first few, but after the third or fourth email in one week, I finally scrolled down to the bottom of the message, and clicked the unsubscribe link. I sent my email to the address, with the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line, and didn’t think about it again – until two days later when I got another.

“Oh well… just taking a little while to process,” I thought.

Then another, and another. Finally, I wrote to their customer service department explaining why I had unsubscribed, and renewing my plea to be removed from their incessant mailings.

Nothing – and I continue to receive unwanted emails from the company, even today.

This is a perfect example of why email marketing doesn’t work. Email marketing has been ruined by marketers who have no idea what they’re doing. I’m extremely wary of providing my real email address to companies, because I don’t want them to do this kind of thing with it. When companies spam their carefully collected database of customers who have trusted them with their personal information, everyone loses. The company loses customers because they’re alienating them, customers get annoyed because they’re being spammed, and marketers face a marketplace of consumers who are gun-shy about providing personal details – and rightly so.

I guarantee that this is the result of a command from above. It reeks of an executive issuing an order against the advice of the marketing department to send out a daily email to their database during the holidays. I hope this is the case, because if more than one person in their marketing department thought this was a good idea, then they have more problems than just losing subscribers.