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.

Bad Laasphe About Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Detroit. By day he works as a manager of SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro where his team performs SEO for Fortune500 clients. By night he's either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world with his own websites - which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. The views expressed here have not been paid for and belong only to Ryan, not any of his employers or clients. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones, add him on Google+ or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com