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Is Angie’s List an Email Spammer?

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Worst Practices  |  New Rules of Sales & Service  |  Marketing

Angies.jpgI was researching contractors for a home improvement project and found myself on Angie’s List, a paid subscription website with crowdsourced reviews of businesses. In order to unlock the customer reviews, I purchased a membership for under ten dollars a year. That’s when the email started. No matter what I do, I cannot stop it.

Very quickly, I started to receive lots of email from Angie’s List, so I went into the email subscription management center and unsubscribed from everything. But when I was still receiving unwanted email, I chose to cancel my subscription, a convoluted process, which I did on May 4.

Angies_opt_out.jpgI was surprised to receive yet another email from Angie’s List on May 28 with the subject line “Check out the June issue of Angie's List Magazine!” 

Perhaps I didn’t unsubscribe properly?

Angie_checklist.jpgFirst I checked the links in the email I received to make sure it was a legitimate message from the company and not a phishing attempt.

Then I checked the email address they sent it to because I wanted to make certain it wasn’t sent to one of my other addresses because that would have explained why I got a message even though I opted out of everything.

When both checked out, I clicked the unsubscribe link.

I was surprised to see that all of the boxes were unchecked. In other words, I had opted out of everything I could. There was no “unsubscribe from all” option. And there was no option to unsubscribe from "Occasional Updates" which was listed on the most recent email I got. 

My only conclusions are:  1) I agreed to some sort of “you can never unsubscribe” clause in their membership agreement or 2)  There is some sort of glitch in their system (hey it happens) which they will fix once alerted to the problem by people like me or 3) Angie’s List is an email spammer.

Crowdsourced reviews of service providers

When your business is reviews of other businesses, I think you need to be extra careful not to generate negative reviews yourself. An organization that helps determine businesses’ reputations needs an impeccable reputation itself. That doesn’t seem to be the situation here.

But perhaps I’m missing something. There is probably a simple explanation or something I did wrong.

Over to you Angie’s List...