Newsletter quality

At some point I must have given my email address to Classmates. I don’t remember doing so, but reputable companies generally don’t buy spam lists, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

This morning I got an offer from them for some sort of subscription bonus. I wasn’t interested, but here’s some hints for Classmates.

1. Permission goes stale. I don’t remember signing up to receive offers from you. If I did it was long enough ago that I don’t recall doing it, but this is the first time I’ve gotten an email offer from you. If you haven’t contacted me for a long time, make sure you remind me why I’m getting this email and make it easy to get off your list.
2. Check your links
   You spell check your newsletter don’t you? Then why don’t you also check and make sure all the links in the email work as well? Especially if you send HTML email to me where I can’t see where the link takes me until I click. I cound’t find unsubscribe instructions, so I clicked a link to your help section. The link has an extra space at the end, which my browser encodes as %20. So I got a page not found error. I happen to know that when I see http://www.classmates.com/help/%20 that you really meant http://www.classmates.com/help/, but not everyone does.
3. Color Blind
   I’m sure you thought that changing some of the text to red was a good way to highlight it. Good thing I’m not color blind or I might not have been able to see it. Many people have trouble reading red text on a white background. In fact I’ve seen some statistics that say up to 10% of people may have trouble with red text on white. The University of Wisconnsin has some good links resources for dealing with color blindness in Web design.