Unsubscribe Friday?

It is late in the evening on Black Friday 2015, and as an agency that designs marketing email campaigns, the end of a very busy week. Over this year’s Black Friday period our clients are seeing record online sales — not just today, but in the week of buildup and likely also in the coming days.

Champagne all round then.

Except there is one thing I noticed today that may signify that all is not well. Let’s do a quick Twitter search for “email unsubscribe”.

It is without question that a lot of brands have made a lot of money today.

I am also not going to assume that a very small segment of Twitter opinion is representative of a global consensus.

However, that search runs and runs. There’s roughly a tweet every 15 minutes. I suspect that, as marketers, we have lost our way a little. I work in email and I get a lot of email—and over the last few weeks I have noticed an overall decline in “best practice” (or just well crafted campaigns that are genuinely interesting as a consumer) and a sharp raise in hard sell campaigns. There has been a lot of over-mailing going on.

Over the year, we spend a lot of time working on our strategy and content. That builds up trust, a relationship with our audience, and in turn makes someone more agreeable to our brand and more likely to turn into a valuable, loyal customer.

We do ourselves a disservice if once a year we panic and throw away that hard work for a quick buck.

Cheers.

I may, of course, be completely wrong, and here we haven’t yet had time to take an in depth look at the results of this year’s work. But I’d be really interested to hear how your Black Friday activity may have impacted your unsubscribe and engagement rates, indeed if at all.