Marketing
Open letter to Barnes & Noble
Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 22 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.
29 Oct 2002
I received an email from Barnes & Noble today that was advertising some newly released books. I generally opt out of marketing email whenever I provide my email address to a site, but sometimes I slip up and end up subscribed. So my first thought was that this is what happened with BN. The fact that it’s been years since I signed up and this is the first message I received seems a little odd to me. I followed the lengthy unsubscribe instructions only to find out that I’m not subscribed to their mailing list.
I sent them this email:
First off, thanks for the easy, uncomplicated unsubscribe process. (That was sarcasm).
Your email states, "To unsubscribe or change your options in receiving messages like this one, please visit bn.com, log in to your account, select 'Name, Password, and Communication Preferences,' and follow the instructions." That’s an awful lot of steps. If you make it easier for people to leave your lists, you’ll have a higher quality list. Right now, there’s a lot of people receiving this email that don’t really want it, but since they find the unsubscribe process cumbersome, they figure it’s easier to just delete the email when it comes in. And you wonder why your open and conversion rates are so low on the email.
It would be a lot easier if you simply said, "To unsubscribe or change your email preferences, visit https://cart.barnesandnoble.com/account/account_prof.asp." You know the url for the email subscriptions, why not just give it in the email instead of a list of instructions on how to navigate to that page?
But enough unsolicited, free advice. The main reason I’m writing is because you sent this email despite the fact that my email preferences specifically say I don’t want to receive marketing email from you. That’s not very nice.
Maybe you sent it to me by mistake. I can understand that mistakes can happen. Perhaps your list software had a hiccup and ignored the email preferences when it sent the email. Maybe someone clicked the wrong button. Fine, I can understand that.
What I can’t understand is why it’s been more than an hour since the email was sent and you haven’t sent any sort of apology. I’d imagine that you know by now that something went wrong. You violated your customers' trust and sent them an email after they told you not to. Now you need to regain that trust. You need to own up to the mistake and perhaps offer something extra to your customers to make up for it. If you were to send out a short email to those that received your first message by mistake and apologize, offering a coupon for free shipping or 10% off, you would turn your customer service blunder into a success. Everyone would be happy. But instead you are apparently choosing to pretend that it didn’t happen at all. So you are getting letters like this one.
By the way, this letter is also being posted on my Web site at http://kalsey.com/blog/2002/10/open_letter_to_barnes_noble.stm. In the interest of fairness, I’ll post your response (if any) there as well, unless you ask me not to.
Thanks for taking the time to read this,
Adam Kalsey,
Kalsey Consulting Group