The UX of email sours customer relationships. I subscribe to nearly 300 email newsletters. Some I receive by signing up to get deals, offers, and updates, explicitly. Others I’ve been opted into after creating an account somewhere, making a purchase, or giving my email address to a company who then sold or shared the information with “trusted partners.”
Looking through these thousands of messages, it’s easy to see that email is the most broken part of any product’s experience.
I refresh my inbox for relevant things: shipping confirmations, receipts, personal correspondence, etc. Marketing emails get tucked in between all of the stuff I’m excited to see. I don’t mean to say all of these newsletters are negative; in fact I’m regularly excited to receive a handful of relevant things like my Medium digest. Whole companies have been built around newsletters that people want. But those newsletters arrive because I’ve chosen to receive them based on the value they provide. The rest fall into one of two categories: poorly designed or spammy.
Spammy emails are so named because of the content they contain, who they’re from, or how they arrive. I’m going to focus on this type of email here and leave the design limitations for another discussion.