Being a startup doesn’t give you the right to spam users

Maybe it’s because I’m getting old or maybe it is because I’m starting to get more important emails, but I’m sick and tired of startups ignoring my right to not receive any kind of promotions, newsletters or notifications. I don’t know how many times I have had to click on an unsubscribe link in an email footer or change the “notifications” preferences in my user panel for these startups to stop sending me emails!

The Latest Offender

Let’s take a look at the last offender in my inbox, Bitcasa. I gave their cloud storing service a try back when they were still in beta (~1 year ago). It was too buggy and so I tried to delete my account but at that time, being in beta and all, you couldn’t do it on your own, you had to contact their support team and since I didn’t store any important files on their servers, I simply let it go and “kept” my account.

Since that beta test, I have received 10 emails from Bitcasa. 3 of them didn’t include an unsubscribe link, which is against the CAN-SPAM Act. The rest of the emails have unsubscribe links, which I clicked on but to no avail. Even after unsubscribing, I would still receive other emails containing promotions, survey questions or announcements.

On the 25th of March, I contacted Bitcasa’s support to get my account deleted in the hope of putting an end to that spam situation. Surely, if I didn’t have an account they would not send me any kind of communications, right? Wrong.

Even though their support team deleted my account quickly, I still to this day continue to receive emails from Bitcasa.

For “fun”, this morning I went through their new signup process. Nowhere during the onboarding process does it says I will receive any kind of communication from them. You have to go into their T&C to find a mention of such a thing. Funny enough, the T&C tells us:

If you no longer wish to receive communications from us, please follow the “unsubscribe” instructions provided in any of those communications, or update your account settings information.

In my account panel, I couldn’t find such a setting…

I know what you are thinking, why not just “report it as spam” in Gmail? It’s a good solution but I would prefer to not get the emails in the first place.

This story might sound harsh for Bitcasa, but there are a lot of startups out there which are guilty of similar thing like:

• make the user login to unsubscribe ( against CAN-SPAM Act)
• Broken unsubscribe links
• Upload users list to their email provider for each campaign without taking into account the unsubscribes.
• Don’t really delete user account.
• Or even worse…

Why It’s Bad For The Startup

From a marketing point of view, sending unwanted emails and thus non relevant information to the users will reduce the conversion rate of the campaign. In my case, If Bitcasa had the right to send me an email (which they don’t since I don’t have an account with them anymore), they should have sent an email to show me all the cool new features I’m missing out to get me back on the service for example.

Sending unsolicited communications will also affect the users trust in the startup and it can get you a bad reputation quickly. Path is the latest to come to mind

Finally, having low open rates and high complain rates (“report as spam”) on your email campaigns can makes the ISPs and mail prodivers mark your dedicated IP as “spam”. Good luck sending any kind of emails after that without spending a lot of time and money with the customer supports of your email providers.

What The Startups Should Do

Think about their users!

1. During the onboarding process, add a checkbox to let users decided if they want to receive any kind of communications. Why waste time ( and money ) if they will just click on the unsubscribe links in the first promotional email?
2. Make it easy to opt out of your communications in the settings panel. Even better, let the user select the type of emails they want to receive. It will definitely increase the open rate and conversion rate of your campaigns.
3. Segment their userbase and send them personalise emails. Why would I want to receive an email announcing that your startup will be at an event in San Francisco when you have all the information to know that I live in France.

I know all this can be hard work and can seems uncessary for a startup that needs to be “Lean”, Fast and “Disruptive” but that doesn’t give you the right to treat your users like shit. Remember, they are the ones making you money.