To unsubscribe or to not unsubscribe...do companies pay any attention?

Do you keep a track of all the companies whose emails you've unsubscribed from?

I certainly tried...5 years ago...But nowadays you buy things from so many websites, sign up to so many email lists and get so much spam, that it becomes impossible to keep track of which emails are solicited and which aren’t.

Fast forward to today...

Just before 2pm, I received an email from Moonpig telling me about their new Valentine’s Day offers...

Didn’t think anything of it, deleted it, carried on with my day.

4 hours later I received another email from Moonpig, apologising for sending me the earlier one:

The question is, had I unsubscribed? I don’t think I had!  I buy cards from Moonpig periodically and so I kind of expected to receive emails from them.  

I only realised it was a mistake when they told me they had made a mistake, and I still don’t think it was a mistake anyway!

So what do you do when you’ve realise you may have sent emails out to people you shouldn’t have...send an email to the same dataset apologising just in case? Or actually work out who shouldn’t have received the email and apologise to them instead.

Considering Moonpig’s business is purely online, this is something Moonpig should be experts at.  Handling personal data, managing CRM databases, sending useful emails etc etc...this should be their bread and butter.

But now, my impression is that they have now made a mistake...when they might not have done.

What would have been the right thing to do?

What will 2011 bring?

So 2011 is now upon us.  A Happy New Year to everyone, I hope you all had a fantastic break.

Since returning from the Christmas break, back into the real world, there’s been big talk about what the trends for 2011 are going to be, with lots of predictions being thrown around.

Initially lots of people have gone stark raving bonkers over Quora – “A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it”.

Or as it appears to me: Yahoo Answers mixed with Wikipedia

It appears useful, but with millions of email notifications being sent through, is it going to be a victim of its own success?

The other site catching people’s attention is about.me – basically a central page where you can link out to all of your other social media pages.

This sounds handy, and could be a positive for SEO in terms of in-bound links, good for business cards and such like where there’s not much space, but you want to link to all your sites.  But do we really need another URL to link to?

It will be interesting over the course of the year to follow these sites, as well as many others that come along and try to be “the next big thing”.

Hopefully using the power of this blog I can try to document this in some small way.

I hope you have a happy and prosperous 2011.