Why Is It So Hard to Change My E-mail Address?

Recently we changed our Internet provider (see April 4 blog post). As part of the change, I opened multiple gMail accounts to replace old ATT accounts. Which meant going through the various e-mails I receive and letting the senders know that my e-mail address was changing.

Dealing with friends and family was easy -- I sent out e-mails with the new information. Done. But then there were the various e-mails from businesses, charitable organizations, and others. Some were easy -- they use Constant Contact, which makes it easy to change your e-mail address. That is if the sender has included that option. (Why would you not include that option?) Even some of the non-Constant Contact e-mails had a link to click to change my e-mail profile.

But some, actually many, were hard. As required under the Federal anti-SPAM law, all of the e-mails had a place to click to opt-out or unsubscribe, but very few had a place to click to change the e-mail address. Sometimes when you clicked on the opt-out link, it gave you the option of changing your profile. But sometimes it simply unsubscribed you, and I never knew which would happen until I clicked the link. Sometimes, in order to change my e-mail profile, I had to remember my user name and password. Okay, that makes sense for my bank and for my credit card, but for PetSmart? And sometimes the message I got was, thank you for the update, it may take four to five days (or even longer) for it to take effect. Excuse me, it takes your computer how long to make a change?

So I changed the ones that were easy to change. As far as the others -- if it was an e-mail I really wanted to continue to get, I made the effort to figure out how to change it. But for the others -- if I couldn't figure out how to easily change the e-mail address, then bye-bye, so long, guess I won't be getting your e-mails anymore.

From a marketing point of view, why would any company want to make it hard for a customer to receive e-mails? Don't they want to advertise to me? Don't they want me to buy stuff from them? And don't they realize that if they don't make it easy, I just might not care. I might not even notice if their e-mails stop showing up. If you send e-mails to customers (future, current, past), make it easy for them to update their e-mail profiles. You don't want to lose them.