What happened after I unsubscribed from GROUPON’s emails? I resubscribed! GROUPON’s impressive persuasion strategy

What will you do when your inbox is occupied by dozens of marketing emails from the same company? I guess you will probably do the same as I always do: click the unsubscribe link and say goodbye to those emails. Last Saturday, I just clicked the link on GROUPON, but I did not unsubscribe from it at last. How come?

You may guess that the unsubscription process for GROUPON is too complicated or it was hard to find the unsubscribe link. I admit I always have trouble in seeking the way to unsubscribe from emails on some websites, which makes me angry all the time. However, this is not the case with GROUPON. Actually, I did unsubscribe before I resubscribe from the emails again in the end. Why? You can try and see what happens. Perhaps you will just do the same because you may feel guilty to unsubscribe from emails.

This is what happened: I decided to unsubscribe from the emails.  When I clicked on the unsubscribe link (which was quite easy to find on the top of the email content), I was told the unsubscription was done with following messages:

‘You are unsubscribed

We’re sorry to see you go!

How sorry?

Well, we want to introduce you to Derrick – he’s the guy that thought you’d enjoy receiving the Daily GROUPON email.’

Below the message, there was a video. I clicked on the button – ‘Punish Derrick’ and watched how this guy got punished: There was another staff coming up behind him and threw coffee at this poor guy. The video made me feel guilty and I clicked on the ‘Resubscribe’ button in the end.

(click on the right picture to link to the video)

You see? GROUPON did not ask me to stay but just take advantage of my sympathy and win a subscriber back. I have never seen any other companies did this when I went through the process of unsubscription. They might try to persuade me to stay in one way or another , but none of their efforts turned out to be more effective than GROUPON’s.

To see what other people react to the GROUPON’s strategy, I searched online and found out most people thought the idea was brilliant.

‘What a great way to soften the blow to an unsubscriber. I try to educate email marketers on how to avoid spam complaints and using unsubscribe techniques like these are a good way to start. In a weird way it makes the unsubscriber feel obligated to re-engage with them, while at the same time it creates a peaceful parting. Great post.’ (个Jared Kimball)

‘Love how they’ve turned a boring process into something that actually makes you think and re-consider. For me at least.’ (Liam)

[Retrieved from: http://mixergy.com/check-out-what-happened-when-i-unsubscribed-from-groupon-coms-emails/#]

Coincidentally, I saw another video on my Global Hollywood class this Monday which also used the same strategy (although not used for marketing) to persuade people not to buy pirate CDs. A man was providing free movies which were illegally downloaded from Internet on the street. When people came to get those free DVDs, he told them they could take the movies but the women stood by would lose her job. At last, a man still took three DVDs while a woman decided to leave with no pirate films. (click on the above picture to link to the video)

In these two cases, guilt is used as a mechanism of persuasion. From my perspective, in terms of marketing, consumers’ guilt could be taken advantaged of well as a powerful motivator for successful marketing. However, it should be acknowledged that marketing with guilt requires careful manipulation. Customers may rebel when getting too much guilt and shame. That is to say, a great marketing strategy with guilt should be subtly weave guilt or shame into the marketing messages, which can influence and motivate customers’ emotional feelings.

Therefore, in this sense, is GROUPON’s persuasion successful?

One thing confused me a lot after my research online for GROUPON’s strategy. It seems that GROUPON has already applied such strategy for about 3 years. If it works, why didn’t other companies follow their way to persuade consumers?

Personally, I think this may be resulted from some ethical issues. Despite the poor Derrick created by GROUPON does contribute to the effective persuasion, would there be any possibility that the image of GROUPON may be ruined as we see the company treat their staff in such a rude way from the video. In other words, each time GROUPON shows the video of punishing Derrick, it is also taking risk of presenting the public the office violence occurring in its office.

To sum up, from the case of GROUPON, I think two aspects related to the marketing strategy should be noticed – email marketing and guilt marketing.  First of all, in this digital era, when companies are sending dozens of subscribed emails to customers, how to keep subscribers stay in their email lists by various ways (e.g. improving the content and style of the email, change the frequency of subscribed emails, etc.) should be given a priority during the email marketing.  In addition, the idea of marketing with guilt can also be applied as an effective method. However, certain flaws in weaving guilt into marketing message should be prevented.