Recently I unsubscribed from a Groupon daily alerts mailing list (I think my wife subscribed me) and I was taken to an unsubscribe page with this funny video. There isn’t any audio but I thought it was one of the most creative pages I’ve ever seen.

Just in case you can’t read the copy it says the following:

“Well, we want to introduce you to Derrick – he’s the guy that thought you’d enjoy receiving the Daily Groupon email.”

This almost makes me want to re-subscribe…Almost.

I’m on a lot of different email marketing lists. Sometimes, I really want to get offers and updates. Other times, I’m just looking for good examples that I can use later for educational purposes.

Today, I received a promotional email from Calistoga, a restaurant chain started by Papa John’s founder, John Schnatter. It’s very similar to Panera Bread. Calistoga’s food is really good.

I wish I could say the same for their email marketing efforts.

Calistoga Cafe Chicken Salad Sandwich Promo

The email itself isn’t bad looking but there’s nothing compelling about it. It’s a picture of a chicken salad sandwich with the caption “…made from scratch in our restaurants using fresh and natural ingredients.”

That’s great. I hope that they make all sandwiches fresh in their restaurant. Isn’t this a given?

The only other thing they share in the email is their restaurant locations. I’m in Louisville, KY where they only have two locations. Why do I care about their four locations in Florida? This makes me feel like they’re just batching and blasting their emails.

The biggest problem (in my opinion) with this email is that there is no strong call-to-action.

I’m a big fan of chicken salad but there’s nothing in this email enticing me to come in and try the sandwich.

Offer me a discount. Make the email personalized. Tell me about their “club” where I could earn points towards free food.

If you’re anything like me, you have a very cluttered email inbox and don’t always take the time to open every email.

If you’re going to take the time to put together a promotional email for your business, give your subscribers a reason to open it.

You have to find a way to stand out. Otherwise, someone else will.

I just unsubscribed from an email that I magically started receiving from my health care provider. I’m assuming they added me to their list after I signed up for online access. I certainly didn’t ask to receive emails about someone winning an iPod Touch… (unless it was me doing the winning).

Anyway, I clicked “unsubscribe” expecting to your get a typical “you’ve been unsubscribed” screen. Instead I got a screen asking me why I unsubscribed.

For some reason, I was caught off guard with “…we would like to know your reasons for unsubscribing.” Is it just me, or is this a little strong? I immediately flashed back to being a kid and having my parents asking me why I did or didn’t do something.

As a marketer, I can appreciate wanting to know why an email recipient unsubscriber from my mailing list. This would be very useful information.

As a consumer, if I unsubscribe from an email, I want to be removed immediately. I don’t want to do anything more than click a link and be told that I’ve been unsubscribed. Nothing sets me off more than being forced to log in to a site to change my preferences (especially if I don’t know my username/password) or even being asked why I’m unsubscribing.

Please just let me unsubscribe peacefully…

Several months ago, I subscribed to the New York Times’ Circuits email newsletter based on a co-worker’s recommendation. It comes once a week and has an article written by David Pogue. He’s a well-known technology guy that writes really good articles about different gadgets. I saw him speak at a Social Media conference in Vegas in April 2008. He was really good. Anyway, I’ve realized that I don’t read the e-newsletter and have attempted to unsubscribe from it. Over the last month, I’ve unsubscribed at least 4 times. Yesterday it showed up in my inbox.

So this time I’m going to take some screen caps of the unsubscribe screen just to make sure I’m not crazy. You can see below that I clicked the “unsubscribe” link in the email. Click on the thumbnail below to see the unsubscribe page.

So I’m crossing my fingers that the email doesn’t come through next week because I really don’t want to have to hunt down someone at NY Times about manually removing me from the list. And I certainly shouldn’t have to…

UPDATE: Apparently the unsubscribe link in the “Circuits” email unsubscribes me from a completely different email called “Tech Updates”. David Pogue left a comment for me pointing that out. I guess we’ll see if “Circuits” shows up next week.

On Tuesday, I just happened to come across Reunion.com on Google and thought I’d sign up just to see if I could cross pathes with an old friend or schoolmate. It was an extremely easy process and took me only a couple of minutes. One thing that I didn’t know was that they automatically signed me up to receive every type of email they send. Almost immediately, I got an email saying that 5 people had searched my name. Out of curiosity, I looked at the people that supposedly searched my name. Of course I hadn’t heard of any of the people and figured they were searching for another Jay Lane. There are tons of them out there.

Anyway, I decided I didn’t want to receive the emails anymore so I clicked on “Opt Out/Modify Alert Frequency” in the email. They had opted me into like 5 different kinds of emails. I selected that I never wanted to receive future emails. Being the niave marketing professional that I am, I expected to not receive any additional emails.

So of course I receive an email the very next day telling me about someone in Texas searching my name. I went back to my preferences and everything I had checked was still checked so why am I still receiving these alerts?

My next thought was to see if I could delete my account. They did provide an easy option for this so I went ahead and deleted my account. I wonder if I’ll still get emails?

My point with this big rant is that if customers asks to be removed from a mailing list, they should be immediately. As an email marketer, I understand why subscribers sometimes report our emails as spam. It’s because they know they’ll automatically be removed.

As email marketers, we need to do a better job of doing what our customers ask when they want it, not when it’s convenient for us.