I just unsubscribed from the Buy.com emails (finally). Those guys really bludgeon you with emails and probably for the better part of six months I just deleted them without even looking at them, like it was part of my daily chores for the day. So I finally decided to unsubscribe. I was surprised that they actually had a preference page to allow me to select one of the following:

- Basic Emails

- 2 Emails per week

- 1 Email per week

- 1 Email per 2 weeks

- 1 Email per month

- Deal Alerts Emails only

- Entertainment

- Technology

- Unsubscribe

A decent choice list by them but the options were radio buttons and not check boxes (meaning I could not choose multiple items)! So I could choose to only receive technology emails but I’d still get them daily. Or I could select to get emails from them once a week but they’d still send me entertainment content which I don’t want. They were so close!

I can’t stress the importance of properly created preference centers for email marketing. And in today’s world if you don’t give your customers as much flexibility and control over how you communicate with them you’re missing the boat. Silverpop, one of our partners and truly one of the best Email Service Providers on the planet, has a great white paper section on their site and in particular they have one entitled, “Give Customers What They Want with Preferences.” It’s a great read. Maybe they should send a copy of it over to Buy.com