I’m sick of being spammed by Jared Spool
Posted October 2nd, 2008 by David HamillI recently unsubscribed myself from the newsletter from User Interface Engineering. It’s not because I don’t like reading the articles, I do. I recommend that anyone with an interest in usability reads the site’s articles. These days I just go to the site and see what’s new there.
The reason I unsubscribed myself was the relentless pimping of conferences that I can’t attend. Just how many emails do we need to receive about the same conference? I haven’t forgotten about it Jared, I’m just not going. It’s too far away.
Now I think about it the Usability Professionals Association are the same. Oh my god most of my spam comes from usability people. How weird is that?
For every meeting of the Scottish Usability Professionals Association I will recieve at least 3 emails. For the UK UPA it will be more. Not only the reminders but they seem to have a sweet sounding lady who keeps messing up the dates on the emails so she has to re-send them.
And then there are the Global UPA events, actually they are quite good. But then I receive an email from the UK UPA telling me that the global conference is happening. Of course I already know this because I received the same email that they did.
I know what you’re thinking. I subscribed to these lists so it’s not spam. Technically you’re right I guess. But to me spam is simply email that people don’t want to receive. Perhaps Jared Spool should include a ‘don’t pimp your conferences to me via email’ option in the sign-up process.
Tags: Jared Spool, SPAM
6 Responses to “I’m sick of being spammed by Jared Spool”
October 30th, 2008 at 9:00 am
You could not be more right
I have been thinking the same thing for quite a while. I even wrote Jared and asked him to change the newsletter format, so that you could just get to the article with one quick click without having to scroll to the end of the email…
However: No answer and certainly no change.
You should always think first, whether or not a newsletter/email is benificiary for the user. If not, you should give him a simple possibility to change it so that it becomes useful.
Overall it leads to a bad image and reputation, even though the stuff, for example Jared is doing is good stuff.
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Hi David,
I hear you and the problem of spamming is a serious one for us at UIE. We know that there are a large number of folks on our list who don’t like receiving the conference announcements and other products and services. They just want the articles and research findings.
Since I am very rigorous about removing myself from email newsletters that don’t provide me value, I do understand the problem of the pitches.
That said, we fall into a bit of a conundrum. We hate the pitches (we even refer to them as “spam” internally, so we don’t forget what they really are). Yet, those messages both you and I hate produce the bulk of our revenue.
We’ve experimented with reducing and eliminating the spam messages, leaving only the articles and research stuff. However, our sales dropped off precipitously.
And here’s the big problem: The research that goes into those articles that you’re fond of is paid for by the events you can’t attend. Years ago, we stopped being a consultancy because it gave us greater flexibility in conducting the research and publishing the results. However, that research costs more than $1 million each year. The money has to come from somewhere.
Right now, we mostly are hoping that people who can’t come to the events just delete the messages. We try, very hard, in the subject lines, to make it clear what kind of email it is, so you don’t even have to open it to see. And, we publish everything on our blog, so you can still get the latest stuff without having to be subscribed.
Until we get better technology in place that gives us the capability to target our marketing better, aiming the conference stuff at those people who know they want to come, this is the best compromise we have.
I hope that explains a little better why we do what we do. I’d love to know what ideas you have for doing better.
(And, maybe, we’ll just have an event near you some day.
)
Jared
November 24th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Hi Jared,
Thanks for the detailed response. How about an option to unsubscribe from a single conversation? So I could remain subscribed to the list but ask not to receive a reminder about the conference after you’ve told me about it once.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
The selective deselect capability is something outside of our current technological capabilities, but something we’ve explored.
Ironically, we need the money we get from spamming to pay for the technology upgrade to stop the spamming.
Jared
November 24th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Well I can’t argue with that really.
If it’s all the same with you though, I’ll just pop in on your website every so often. In fact I’ve just subscribed by RSS. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.
You don’t spam via RSS do you? :0)
November 25th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Not as much.
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