Email Resolution Followup

At the start of the year, I made a post about reducing the amount of noise that gets in my inbox.  One way to try to reduce the amount of noise was by unsubscribing from emails where the content was a bunch of embedded graphics that required viewing the graphics to get any ‘content’ from the message.  

Well, there were quite a number of emails that I began unsubscribing from who were following this tactic.  They’ve been unsubscribed and, generally, I would say that I don’t miss them.  There was a brief moment recently where I thought to myself that I hadn’t received any email from Birkenstock recently.  Nothing that wanted me to resubscribe, however.

The net result from unsubscribing from the graphic-only emails was not quite what I was hoping for.  There were still a lot of promotional emails that I was getting.  Way too many.  So, I decided to alter my tactic some.  

Gmail is a blessing and a curse.  Lots of customization one can do to apply labels to make it easier to find/sort/organize emails.  Since there were still a fair amount of promotional emails that were making it to my inbox, I created a rule to apply a label that would automatically put the email in a folder, skipping the inbox.  I applied this rule in late February.

That has been working well and I have, as of this date, accumulated over 500 promotional emails in that folder.  The actual count is higher than that as initially, I was cleaning out the label.  So, for those first couple of weeks, some of the emails are no longer in the label.

You may ask why not use the built-in tools in Gmail to filter the promotional emails.  Well, I could, but, again, it’s a privacy thing.  When you set up those filters in Gmail, you are giving Gmail/Google/Alphabet permission to read your emails to know how to organize them in their pre-determined labels.  Not interested in growing my digital footprint.

The rule that I created is simply based on the sender.  One thing I noticed quite quickly is that there are many marketers who are using user@company.genericsender.com where genericsender is a mail service that is being used by multiple companies.  Change the domain portion of the email address and the rule doesn’t quite work.  Fortunately, you can use a wildcard for the user portion of the email address in the rule, but to my knowledge, you cannot on the domain portion.  So, I suspect that as marketers change to other email senders - or even back to the company they are sending email for - that more of this email would end up back in my inbox.

I found a couple things very interesting about this.
1.  There was a site I went to to make a purchase.  There was the standard pop up to get x percent off the first purchase for your email.  Ok, sure, not going to keep getting the emails in the long run anyway.  After I made the purchase using the promo code they sent to my email, I started getting duplicate emails from them.  It’s not as though I used different email addresses for each; it was the same email address.  I’m guessing I was added to one segment related to the promo code and the other was related to the sale.  Looks like they don’t do a very good job of unduplicating their mailing lists.
2.  Generally speaking, when emails come into my inbox, I don’t let them gather unnecessarily.  When I let them accumulate in the rule-based label, I saw a new pattern emerge.  This was having to do with frequency.  There are some of the marketers that send out an email just about every day.  Some marketers send multiple emails in a day - usually around some sale.  One would think that if I am not clicking links in your email, you would realize that I probably am not worth your sending out so many emails to.
3.  If your business is having a sale on everything every other week like clockwork, you may need to re-evaluate your business model.  Especially if your business routinely extends the sale deadline.  Having seen this numerous times, some retailers I’ve identified this is their modus operandi.  Think how many emails you received in October about early Black Friday sale that extended through the middle of December.

Since the rule went into effect, one sender has sent over 80 emails.  The one that has send the duplicates is over 70.

Another thing that I have noticed - and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the graphic-only emails or the rule that was set up.  Rather it is zombie subscriptions.  In 2017 was the last time that I took part in anything really heavy related to my photography business.  Life has taken me in a different direction but I still keep my photography site up and still enjoy taking photos.  There have been a couple of places that I used to do business with 9+ years ago that I’m suddenly starting to get emails from them.  Somehow - whether I unsubscribed or I no longer was a valuable enough email to market to - I quit getting emails from them for years.  Years!  In the last couple months, two of them have started sending me emails on the regular.  Unsubscribe.

The photography related zombie emails aren’t the only ones I have been getting.  There have been a few others as well.  Sign-up, business relations, etc that haven’t used in years rearing their head.  Like they say, the Internet is forever?

Back to the email heap.  Now that this post is going live, I’m going to be going through the pile and unsubscribing en mass to most of the emails.  Some that I have already done, like the Birkenstock one noted above, have already stopped.  Some have the option on their website where you can adjust the frequency of how often they will send you email.  I like that.  I may not want to totally stop receiving some of the emails.  At the same time, I don’t want to get one every day either.

Next, after the heap shrinks, I’ll go back to the rule and probably remove it so that it is not based on the sender.  Instead, I’ll go back to using a regular aliased email address. Something like user+spam@gmail.com. That way, I won’t have to worry about marketers changing the email address they are sending from.  And, I’ll probably also set it so that they are all marked as read before skipping the inbox and applying the label.  That way, I don’t even have to get the notification that there’s messages in the label.  I can, if I remember, to go in on occasion and see what’s in there.

Onward.

-Michael.