How NOT to email customers

A while a go a family member sent me a link to her pictures on prestige portraits – a pretty well known photo company here that probably does 90% of area high school senior pictures and such.

Anyway, they have a feature that lets you email your comps to friends and family so that they can choose which ones they like. It’s a much cooler system than the “here’s your samples, give us a $300 deposit and bring them back later when you order” style that I had to do when I was in High School.

Where they’ve screwed up though, is that they automatically add all of these email addresses to their mailing lists. I say lists here, because I seem to get all kinds of promotions from them. They even emailed me how I can buy reprints of the photos I was looking at. I can see the thinking behind their marketing team, but there’s one major point at play here: I never gave you my email address, nor did I opt in. All of your marketing emails are in fact spam (and I report them as such to gmail.)

I found an unsubscribe link (which is very cludgy and barely works) but it seems to have worked.

For those of you in the marketing business: NEVER (repeat: NEVER) start enrolling people into newsletters if they themselves didn’t opt in to that newsletter. In fact, it should always be a double opt in where they confirm it from an email.

Prestige, please change your policy. I’m probably not the only pissed off person.

April 24th, 2008