I’ve been trying to consolidate the email addresses I use to get away from using tagged addresses. This involves changing my email address on a lot of company email lists. While almost every newsletter and marketing email now has an easy and quick unsubscribe option at the bottom of every mail, few offer an easy change of address function, and many make it nearly impossible.
There are of course a few exceptions, those that make it quite straightforward to change your email address. With others I’m able to use the unsubscribe function and then go back to subscribe the new address on their web site.
But then there are the others. The worst seem to be those associated with magazine subscriptions. They often require you to enter a subscriber ID from the address label on the latest issue of the magazine just to get into the ‘customer service’ area and even then not all of them even have an option to change the email address. There are also a few sites where you use your email address as login name, but there is no obvious way to change the address.
Honestly guys, a lot of these newsletters and such I could easily do without. If I need to spend more than a couple of minutes to figure out how to change my address, I’ll just hit unsubscribe and be done with it. And you’ve just lost access to someone you might have sold something to later.
The solution is simple: down at the bottom of every email you send out, just below your ‘unsubscribe’ link, put a ‘change of address’ link too. On the linked-to page, ask for the new email address and then change it. Don’t ask me for my subscriber ID, my mother’s maiden name or my shoe size. Just my new email address.