Why I Unsubscribed From Your Crappy Email Newsletter

Dear 95% of email newsletter publishers,

I'm not one of those obnoxious "X Technology is Dead" types. In truth, there's some information I get from social sharing environments, some from my hundreds of RSS feeds, some from print sources, and (yes) some from good ol' email newsletters.

As to the newsletters, though, it's clear that some of you aren't even trying. It's a shame.

They say that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time and typewriters could produce the work of Shakespeare.

You: Two monkeys sharing a broken IBM Selectric for six minutes. Tops. 

This is why I unsubscribed from your newsletter:

I didn't subscribe to it in the first place. Yes, anti-spam laws be damned, you felt that I so needed to be exposed to your peri-professional crowdsourced rantings that you inserted my name into your database. (One of you managed to find almost all of my email addresses.)

Every single subject line is about an inflated "PR flap/fiasco/kerfuffle". Are you so desperate to get in front of the next Kryptonite Lock, JetBlue, Domino's Pizza or Motrin Moms that you have to inflate every stupid, minor dustup online? And, no, your persistent use of the word "fail" as a noun does not make you cool. 

You tried the "Re:" trick. Inserting the "Re:" in the subject head to make it look like we've enjoyed rich, rewarding correspondence is sneaky. Nice try, but I'm pretty good at remembering whom I've emailed.

Your straining-plaintext-past-the-breaking-point format is impossible to read. HTML email. Just saying.

You and/or your contributors have nothing to say. Your editorial is too obviously driven more by what you can get people to contribute for free than what you're audience actually wants or needs to know. 

So, that's it. Two or three of you survived today's purge. The rest of you were just forcing me to abuse my delete key as a daily morning ritual. 

Photo by Christopher S. Penn

Comments

[Tyson]

I'm going to remember the two monkeys bit forever. Thanks for the laugh!

[Joe]

I’m amazed email newsletters are still around and haven’t been supplanted by blogs and social media. In my experience most email newsletters these days are just reprints of the content you’d find in the company’s blog. Not worth cluttering my inbox over.