As a follow up to yesterdays ‘Yeay for Amazon’ post, I’m writing regarding today’s experience with Borders.
As a rewards member, I receive emails regarding sales and new releases which come about once a month. These are useful and contain coupons for things I’ll actually buy. But recently, I’ve been receiving many emails regarding the Borders Reward Perks program that I joined. These are additional rewards from other vendors (flowers, candy, retail, etc.). They’ve been coming in increasing regularity and are very very annoying. Also, I mistake them for my usually happy encounter with the Borders Rewards emails that I enjoy.
Today, I decided to take action: updating my subscription settings. Now, normally, like many of you, I deal with these annoying emails by adding them to spam or deleting them over and over again. I decided to do a solid by all permission based email marketers and to delete myself from their mailing lists, thereby keeping their analytics accurate, and my karma clean by not asking for email, and then calling it spam. I used the opt out link provided and was taken here:
This isnt for my Reward Perks. This is for my normal communication with Borders. I was confused because I only had one subscription checked, and it wasnt the one they had sent me via email. I then hunted and pecked all around the site, to log in to a second section of the site (thats right, I was not only not logged in from the email they sent me, but I had to log in again to this other section). Once there, I was given a second set of subscription settings:
Although now I wont be receiving those pesky emails, how many other people will go through these hoops to make sure versus just adding this to their spam folder or opting out of everything all together? I wonder how confusing this is to others?
Thoughts?
jesskrywosa.com 
I can’t get them to actually unsubscribe me from their stupid Perks e-mail. I must have gone through that process at least 5 or more times in the last several months, yet they keep coming! It’s making me NUTS! I’m not at all a fan of theirs. They must be in violation of the can-spam act.
I’ve had issues with being really confused by borders website before too. It’s like they don’t consider user experience at all.
I had a similar experience with Delta Airlines. I booked one flight with them years ago and emails continue unabated. I’ve tried the unsubscribe before and it’s so labyrinthian, borderline Machiavellian … you’re essentially sent through all these different screens with trick questions until you finally get to one with no unsubscribe option. I long ago gave up and finally did the “label as spam” thing.
What this kind of corporate arrogance overlooks is Rule #1 of sales: We buy things (generally) from people/entities we like. I may not be able to unsub from Delta emails, but I sure as heck don’t plan to book a flight with them in the future.