
Unroll.me Is Doing Email Marketers a Favor - shortformblog
https://medium.com/@shortformernie/email-marketers-unroll-me-is-doing-us-a-favor-a9d95bcc68fc#.k28vzpmc3
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newscracker
Slightly off topic for this post. The features of unroll.me look appealing,
and would save a lot of time and frustration for many people. But what is
unroll.me's business model? I don't see any pricing mentioned on the site. I
presume this is one more service that's "free" to gain a good customer base.
Considering that unroll.me was bought by Slice (slice.com) a year ago, which
is related to tracking stuff you buy online and is in turn owned by Rakuten,
this looks like a web of services that can gain a lot from your use of them.

Most (not all) email subscriptions are a result of financial transactions like
purchases. I value my privacy, and even though I know that providers like
Gmail or Yahoo or Microsoft use automated systems to read my mails with such
transactions, I'm just limited to trusting them (and their employees and their
policies). By giving access to other companies to my mailbox with valuable
information, I would just be increasing my exposure further. When companies
start providing services "for free" in exchange for access to your personal
information, habits and actions, it always looks very uncomfortable.

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GeoffreyP
Occasionally there's a single ad in a summary email.

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pavel_lishin
> _The problem is, most marketers don’t think of their content this way—they
> see email as the easy way out, the cheap source for constant clicks._

> _To put it simply: Unroll.me isn’t the problem, disengaged readers are._

The _problem_ is the mounds of garbage that marketers try to inundate us with.
Disengaged readers are merely the symptom.

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danr4
Really useful service! I actually thought about making a service that gives
you an email just for newsletters, and lets you manage ONLY subscriptions. I
don't think newsletter emails belong in my regular inbox.

plug: i have unlist.me domain if anyone's interested in buying

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pavel_lishin
At least gmail makes it fairly easy to deal with this - just sign up for
newsletters with _your.email+newsletters@gmail.com_ , and set up a filter to
keep those things out of your inbox.

You can also go the extra mile - as I did - and set up a catch-all domain and
register for each service with an individual email, so that when you suddenly
notice an uptick in offers to enlarge your genitalia, you'll know exactly who
sold you out.

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dexwiz
Most marketings have a formula that says

    
    
      X Emails x Y Conversion Rate = Z Profit
    

It's much easier to increase X than it is Y, and turns out that method is
pretty effective.

