Christmas is the one time of year where every company in the world is guaranteed to send out their messages of festive cheer along with a fantastic 5% discount coupon for use in their sale which start at 6am on boxing day (terms & conditions apply)…
No to automatic emails
It annoys me that so many companies who i rarely hear from throughout the year use it as way to squeeze in some promotion by camouflaging it as a “We love you, have a great Christmas” message. It’s as if anyone with your email address comes crawling out of the woodwork at this time of year. Some, because they genuinely want to thank you for your custom throughout the year, others because it represents another opportunity. It’s easy to tell the difference.
I’m taking advantage of it all though by unsubscribing from literally every newsletter i’m getting. I don’t want any. My goal for the start of the new year is to have a subscription & notification-free inbox. I’ve even removed all twitter, LinkedIn & facebook notifications (email notifications) which probably means i’ll be slower to respond to people because i won’t have a red envelope or pop up alerts nagging at me every minute to open up an unread message.
What email needs..
How do you know who has your email address? You don’t. Do you have a record of everyone that has sent you an email? Yes. Is that list nicely formatted and searchable? No. Why isn’t it? Beats me. I think gmail & all email providers should provide a list of people who have your email address or who have sent you an email. It needs to happen otherwise the value of email will be diluted to the extent it becomes as useful as a letter in a pile of junk mail & ads. It becomes ‘work’ to sift through emails which we don’t really want to find the emails we do want.