The lunacy of the unsubscribe obsession

I got a weird email yesterday. It was from a brand that I’ve never heard of. But it wasn’t spam. In fact, it was a truncated newsletter style email - kinda like The Hustle. 

But, once again, I had NEVER heard of this brand. 

“How tf did they get my email?” 

“Why are they blatantly violating CAN-SPAM laws?

“Especially for a nothing burger of an email such as this - which ain’t nothing more than silly platitudes mixed with random quotes from ‘successful’ people?”

And so, I did some digging… 

Turns out, I DID, in fact, join this email list. 

Why then did I have absolutely no idea who this brand was?

Well, looks like this brand subscribed to the lunacy of unsubscribe obsession. 

I signed up for their emails in a-literal-nother life:

I hadn’t started my business yet. I’m not even sure if I started planning to leave my former employer yet. 

The pandemic hadn’t happened yet - it wasn’t even a blip on the rader. 

It wasn’t even this DECADE!

Yes, I signed up for this email on June 7th, 2019. 

Then, they decided to wait an absurd 2,158 days to send me an email. 

They waited almost 6 full years to send me a single email!

There’s only one way to rationalize this delay:

They were so worried about me unsubscribing they waited 70 months and 3 weeks until they felt confident to email me. 

Of course, the irony here is obvious: 

Because they played to not lose instead of playing to win, my poor brain didn’t even remember reading their forgettable brand name. This could’ve been avoided with somewhat regular emails. 

Alas, this is the utter lunacy of worrying about unsubscribes. 

Maybe there’s an exception that proves the rule, but it’s probably not the best idea to only reach out to your audience every 6 years. This is hardly an insight either. 

But this is what could happen when you’re more worried about the ego hit of an unsubscribe instead of, y’know, using your email to grow your business and prove to your ego that you know better. 

Moral of the story?

If you’re gonna play the email game, you might as well play to win instead of play to not lose. Playing to not lose has killed more businesses than mayhap any other mistake. 

But if I’m being generous here, I could’ve ended up on some weird kind of segment that they didn’t send to for some reason. Given that this was the case, it’s probably best just to delete the 6-year-old lead who you’ve never sent a single email to. Or, at least, send them a quick update email to apologize for overlooking me and to set expectations about the emails I can expect. 

I probably still would’ve unsubscribed anyway. But my guess is fewer people total would’ve unsubscribed. 

Anyway, I digress. 

If you wanna play the email game to win - and to win bigly - then hit reply, and let’s chat. 

John