Sunday, September 19, 2010

My letter to Groupon after creating an account

Dear Groupon,

I like what you do.  Thanks for being there and doing it.

I signed up in order to take advantage of a recent deal.  In my e-mail inbox, there was a welcome message with the following: "Every morning, you'll find one exclusive deal waiting in your inbox. We can't wait to help you discover huge discounts on all the cool things to do in your city."

Wait, what!?!  No.  No no no no no no.  Nowhere in the account-creation process did I knowingly authorize you to send these deals to my e-mail address, much less every single day.  That's a horrible default behavior, and if I let companies do that my inbox would become an impenetrable pile of junk.

Now, I realize that many people who sign up aren't familiar with RSS readers, or Twitter, or other, more organized methods of receiving periodical offers. E-mail is fine for those people.  It is NOT fine for me.  My inbox is precious.  No offense.

Now relax.  I do know that I can unsubscribe from your e-mails, and I have done so using the link provided in the fine print of the aforementioned e-mail.  What upsets me is that I needed to do this.  I thought surely there would be a setting in the "My Account" preferences to easily manage this.  Nope.  Surely it's in the FAQ?  Alas, no.  Sticky forum post?  Apparently not.

In fact, unsubscribing using the legally-mandated link in the e-mail was the very last thing I tried, because I shouldn't have to do it from there.

Maybe I made a mistake, and I simply missed the checkbox in the sign-up process.  If that's the case, then the checkbox needs to be bigger, and other options, such as RSS, Facebook, and Twitter need to be offered.  More to the point, you need to start thinking of your business as more than a mailing list. 

Violating my trust by signing me up for a mailing list is not the best way to begin a customer relationship.  Please, rethink your account sign-up process and default behavior.  The "How Groupon Works" page made me think I would get to choose how I would be notified of new deals.

Meanwhile, keep offering those great local deals.  I look forward to an increasingly net-savvy Groupon.

3 comments:

  1. Maybe they'll hire you to get this set up??

    ReplyDelete
  2. I got so annoyed by the daily deal emails that I deleted my account. My inbox is also sacrosanct!

    ReplyDelete