Please Tell Us Why You Unsubscribed
And Other Ways Tech Products Don’t Work for Us
Lately it’s been hard to shake the feeling that many software products and platforms don’t work as they should. I’m thinking primarily of email here, because I use it daily, and prefer it as a written communication tool to most other alternatives.
But as an experience, checking my Inbox is deteriorating by the day. I am as frequently annoyed by an incoming email as gratified. The ratio of pleasant surprises — the note from a stranger writing to say they enjoyed something I wrote! — to emails that elicit an “Ugh, not this ___ again” reaction is bad. After a few weeks of email accomplishing little other than making me feel psychically itchy I developed a pet theory, which is that fuses are short nation-wide, and that while a lot of this has to do with the preponderance of proud assholes at the forefront of our culture, at least some of our current malaise stems from the fact that we get too many pings a day from too many organizations that want to sell us too much crap.
I’m not thinking crap = physical products only, and I am not thinking only of online retailers, but let’s start there, with shopping.
Is it healthy — in a Goop-y, mindfulness sense — to be addressed as a shopper so often? I’m not sure our brains have evolved to the point where we can easily process being invited to purchase things all day long.
When I was growing up in Holland, the national broadcaster placed commercials before and after the nightly news, and that was it. No commercials during or between Who’s the Boss? and Dynasty. Then even within these tight constraints commercials were interspersed with non-commercial stop-motion animation snippets featuring Loeki the Lion, and no, I am not making this up.
I couldn’t tell you what the point of Loeki was, other than to keep viewers entertained. Of course that presumes that someone in charge had determined that commercials were tedious in and of themselves.
Now commercial emails all come with this celebratory tone, as if the chance to look at, I don’t know, pictures of children’s sneakers, is a really interesting opportunity for us. But it’s not.
It’s not bad. It’s just tedious.
All this to say, in my lifetime I can’t remember a time when I was addressed as a shopper — and nothing but a shopper — as relentlessly as I am today.
Historically, of course — and even today in much of the world — you would walk down a market street or souk and someone would start yelling at you to please maybe buy some apples or olives or cotton socks. Lots of loud voices, lots of wanting you to buy stuff. But you had a different relationship to all this energy. First, the market typically has clear borders; it terminated at an intersection, and once you crossed the street, the voices receded. The yellers didn’t follow you home. Second, the person yelling at you to buy stuff had a face, and they stood within earshot of you, so presumably, if they were looking out into the crowd, and not just minding their apples, they could see your face, too, and meet your gaze.
Is being able to click Report Spam on unwanted marketing emails the same? I I don’t think so. Some essential human consideration is missing.
Last year I prided myself on fearless unsubscribing. No FOMO for me, I thought, and so I unsubscribed left and right. I deleted hundreds of emails without opening them. Occasionally I left emails from KLM or Air France lingering, with the magical thinking that somehow this might help shorten the distance between me and my next flight to Europe. It didn’t.
Now this same unsubscribe regimen isn’t enough to stay on top of the incoming. Retailers that previously emailed once a day now email three times a day. That’s speaking of the basic promo email they send to everyone who didn’t remember to uncheck the email permissions box that their default checks for you upon placing an order. Now any online purchase garners at least three follow-up emails. Dear You: You recently bought X, please take a brief moment to tell us how much you liked it. And, We value your input. Share your review so everyone else can enjoy it, too. Then, At Y, your opinion is everything. Can you help us with a quick, one-question survey? On a scale of 0 (not likely) to 10 (very likely), how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
I received this most recent flurry of emails because I bought a pair of 2T-sized green pajamas for my son’s Halloween costume.
So all of this is a lot of fuss over nothing, I know. Both the retailer’s attempts to extract more information from me post-purchase, and this post, which is getting rather long.
But at the same time we need to not simply accept that it has to be this way, or even that it makes good business sense for companies to market to us in this way, because, after all, it’s “free” compared to old printed marketing materials that came via the post. It’s not free, and the fact that we imagine it is just speaks to how we undervalue our time — and our bargaining power as participants in the attention economy. I mean, maybe, just maybe, if a company values my opinion so much, they could offer me something in exchange for that opinion. Like, five cents. I don’t care. Just something.
Meanwhile I’d love to see an expanded menu of reasons for unsubscribing. Part of me loves the economy of language, the crisp tone, in the MailChimp one you see most often today; Joan Didion could have written it, though I don’t imagine she’d use the “should be” construction. Another part of me thinks the reasons suggested are far too anodyne given unwanted email’s potential to work our nerves.
“I no longer want to receive these emails” is a polite tautology. Why am I selecting not to receive those emails anymore? Because I would prefer not to receive them anymore. Yes of course. If you check this box, as I usually do, you’ve not said a lot. Some of what you’re not saying might be useful information to the sender.
My first suggestion for an additional reason option would be something like, “Your emails make me feel worse, both about myself and the value your company adds to my life. Please stop.”
The limited options we see instead function as a sort of training — to not bring the full array of human emotion to the experience, to not expect the visceral feedback the guy at the market yelling about apples might get from you on a bad day, when the best you can muster is a scowl and quick turn to face the other direction. It’s just odd that this platform that’s supposedly deployed to help organizations “connect” better is…so hit-and-miss at its primary job.
This whole phenomenon connected in my mind to concerns raised in a recent Lunch with the FT column — a product I thoroughly enjoy and which makes life better — featuring Apple’s Chief Design Officer Jony Ive. He says:
Very often, so much of what a product ends up being able to do isn’t what you initially thought. If you’re creating something new, it is inevitable there will be consequences that were not foreseen — some that will be great, and then there are those that aren’t as positive. There is a responsibility to try and predict as many of the consequences as possible and I think you have a moral responsibility to try to understand, try to mitigate those that you didn’t predict.
Ive continued that it was part of the culture at Apple “to believe that there is a responsibility that doesn’t end when you ship a product.” Then, according to his interviewer, he frowned. “It keeps me awake.”
It’s important to pay attention to how acts of communication make you feel. It’s o.k. to get annoyed over things that “shouldn’t,” you think, affect you, a grown person with the power to report spam. Because the more we accommodate ourselves and our attention to people who only want to sell us stuff, the less of ourselves we have to work with.
