The email alert method of retention works to some extent, but the more engaged users (multiple meetup groups and interests) get so much email it just becomes spam. Plus, alerting to new groups in a very high traffic location is also a bit overwhelming. I wonder if they are tracking unsubscribe-from-email metrics and aiming to satisfy this (probably quite small percentage-wise) set of users too?
They need to stop forcing people to login to unsubscribe. That missing feature has caused me to delete my meetup account completely a few times now.
Why do I keep going back? Because a local group I meet outside of meetup has their mailing list, schedule, or something on their meetup site and I need to have an account to take part.
Though honestly I'm about to delete my account and will likely never re-create it.
Agree completely. I think there is definitely high-churn on their subscriber base if things start to feel spammy. Basically yes something should be considered relevant after I express interest in it. But I find that meetup does a bad job of differentiating what the service sends out versus what I decided to get alerts on. Compare this to something like Quora where when I 'follow' a topic (another type of indication of interest) I get email alerts. But its simple for me to know as a user that I can stop following that topic and stop getting alerts. That doesn't mean I shut down all of Quora alerts at once. Compare this to Convore, where I unsubscribed immediately after I started getting all kinds of email from them that seemed completely irrelevant to what I had originally signed up for. I couldn't figure out what on the site was causing all the spam. So what did I do? I shut down the entire service. Bottom line you are playing with fire with email alerts -- make sure its clear to the user whats causing the alerts to happen and give them fine-grained tools to control them.
