Andy Parkinson’s World

Here’s the kind of marketing mistake that really makes you wonder “what are they thinking”.

It should come as no surprise to anyone in marketing – especially not the people at Cisco – that email marketing messages MUST include a way for the recipient to unsubscribe from the list. And it doesn’t take a whole lot of thinking to realize that unsubscribing should be easy. One click and you’re off the list. Anything more and people just might get angry enough to report you as a spammer.

So why then does Cisco make it so hard? Why would you want to keep someone on your list who doesn’t want to be there?

Yesterday I received an email from someone at NexusIS inviting me to a Cisco Technology Open House at the Cisco office in Los Angeles. I don’t know how I ever got on this list but I’m not interested so I clicked the button at the bottom of the page that says “Unsubscribe from Cisco”.

So far so good. But it takes me to a page that makes me check all the things I want to unsubscribe from and then provide my first and last name. Well that’s annoying enough but I did it anyway.

And then it takes me to yet another page that wants me to provide (get this):
•    My complete mailing address
•    Country
•    Phone Number (including area code)
•    Email address
•    And the reason why I am unsubscribing.

Are they kidding? I never wanted to be on this list – why should I jump through hoops to get off of it.

In case you’re thinking – as I was – that maybe it’s NexusIS and not Cisco that’s so annoying, it’s Cisco. The logo and copyright info is all over the forms.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this is not to bash Cisco but to make the point that email marketing is only as good as your list – how qualified and happy the people are to be on it. If you don’t make it easy to unsubscribe, you might end up with a list of people who hate you.

Make it easy.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, spam, unsubscribe