General: Please don't spam unsubscribes

I receive a lot of email. Most of it is relevant to me, or at least was at some point.

Dodgy brokers

That’s not the case for all my email though. A while back, I started receiving lots of email offering me things as a recruiter. But I’m not a recruiter. However, dodgy companies have included me in a list of recruiters for some reason, and then rent out access to the list to other companies in some way.

And yes, I’m looking at you today Apollo.io .

My favourites are the emails that say things like I was looking at your site today, and I think we could help recruiters like you and so on. Clearly they haven’t ever visited my sites but they’re trying to hide the source that they’ve used.

I generally email them back, tell them they’ve bought access to a dodgy email list, and suggest they ask for their money back. Generally, they then tell me they didn’t buy a dodgy list -> we just use Apollo to integrate with our CRM. Not good. I’ve now used Apollo’s stop selling my info button, so we’ll see what happens next.

Unsubscribing

But it’s made me think further about subscribing, and more importantly, unsubscribing. If anyone is on our lists, I want them to be able to unsubscribe as easy as possible. I don’t want to send irrelevant info. And while we’re on a plan with Flowdesk that did have unlimited subscribers, most email services also charge per-subscriber. So the list owner is paying extra to a service, just to send subscribers info they don’t want in the first place.

So, I end up unsubscribing a lot as well. Some lists are easy to unsubscribe from. Others make it really hard. Don’t do that. Make sure that one click on the email takes people to exactly where they need to be to unsubscribe.