Don't You Want Me to Stay?
I have a new personal email address, and I'm slowly migrating my email newsletter subscriptions and the like from the old to the new address. What surprised me during the process is this: Numerous companies--even some with progressive offerings like selecting your preferred frequency--don't offer a way to change your email address in their system. You have to unsubscribe, then resubscribe with your new address.
As you might imagine, of the several companies that don't offer a "change of address" option, I only opted to do the work to unsubscribe, then resubscribe, with one. That's right, one. I bid a fond farewell to the rest. I imagine that at some point I'll make a purchase from the others' websites or stores and they'll ask me to subscribe again at that time. Will I? Most likely--if they make it easy to do so.
What about your company? Is it easy for your customers to change their email addresses, or are you losing subscribers because you're not offering a change-of-address option either on your newsletter or other email communications, or as an option on the unsubscribe page?
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Sounds like poor design. Maybe this sort of thing was slapped together like some companies' social media marketing implementation. Nobody designing the system thought about what would happen if an email address changed, or else didn't care.
Technology always has the ability to enable good service. Unfortunately, too many marketers and service operations professionals disregard this aspect.
Agree with the prior commentary about the importance of IT, Marketing, Customer Service / Service Ops working together in execution stages. Truthfully, this collaboration should move further upstream into service development, where the functions would decide together what role they want the customer to play in service delivery, then develop the enabling service technology to enable that role.
Amber,
Thanks for the insight. Interestingly, several of the websites that did offer a change-of-email-address option used what seems to be the same vendor, because the prompts and design were quite similar. Just another proof point of how important it is for IT and marketing or customer service to work collaboratively to determine the right solutions for the best (i.e. retention-building) customer experience.
The likely reason for this hassle has to do with how their email marketing software is built.
It is likely that your email address is the key (database talk for unique identifier) to your record.
As any DBA worth their salt will tell you changing keys is a BAD idea.