Can you stop hearing Sting’s catchy hook in your head?
Anyway.
I get as much email as the next person, and I am a “relentless unsubscriber”. When I delete a particular newsletter a couple of times or more, I just hit the Unsubscribe link, and make it stop.
Every once in a while, I find one where the sender did not provide such a link, or maybe where their link is just some fake URL, or sometimes is not even clickable.
I know why they do it. They don’t want you to unsubscribe. They want to be able to continue feeding you with their content and be able to market to you.
So they are like the date that doesn’t get it. The one that you tell them that you are just not that much into them, but they continue to show up every time, and even stalk you.
And what do you do with an individual like this when they don’t leave you any other option? You file for a restraining order. This not only makes them stop contacting you, but they also get flagged as a stalker.
So that’s exactly what happens with the “persistent newsletter”, once you get tired enough, you delete all their messages, and you flag them as spam. And just like in the case of the unlucky date, this outcome is much worse than if they would have just let you unsubscribe. They not only cannot send you their newsletter, but any email they will send you later from the same email address may also get blocked. And that’s not all, once enough people flag them, email delivery services will start stopping them getting through.
This same thinking applies to many other contract-based (or not!) tactics that attempt to keep users in a pool that they have already decided to leave. None of them really work without consequences. When a user, subscriber, or to that effect, a potential mate have decided to leave, no chain is going to be strong enough to make them stay.
So if you love somebody, set them free (free, free, set them free).