The playbook from bloggers to marketing agencies to big companies is simple: Harvest email addresses and engage an audience through email marketing newsletters. For players on a smaller scale, this is done in earnest because your email address is a gateway into a community with a shared interest or passion. For others, the motivation is purely commercial. The organization sending you email will try to make money by bundling you with others in a marketing stream. These businesses often offer you something for free in exchange for getting your email address on their list.
How does one manage email or stay up to date when just a few subscriptions can easily accumulate into dozens of unread messages in your inbox? Many articles have been written on the topic of managing email, but newsletters are different. They are not personal, so they are outside the applications of a “Getting Things Done” type of email management system. They are not unsolicited because of the opt-in approach.
Perhaps the most helpful thing in forming a strategy for newsletters is to realize that although they are delivered via email, they fall in a different category. Email providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com have built-in filters that separate newsletters from your normal inbox – a first defense for most people. But there are several things that you can do beyond accepting the defaults to manage a newsletter as a non-email.
If you don’t mind spending money and handing over the credentials for your email to a third party, services such as Unroll.me will combine all of your newsletters into a single digest-format email that is easy to manage. They also automate the process of removing your address from a newsletter subscription.
Evernote and other similar products offer users an email address that forwards content to a “notebook” managed by the software.
Email providers such as Gmail and Outlook also provide users the ability to create an alias for their email account. The key advantage is that you can create filters based on aliases.
One final thought: Some people might be tempted to undervalue an email address. This pitfall often rises from the fact that we’ve come to expect email, as a service, to be free. But even if you create a secondary “spam” account or if you use the default features of an email provider to manage excess email, perhaps the biggest cost of all is your attention. As your inbox fills up with unread messages, there is a psychological cost to that clutter.
Getting ahead of the new battleground for your inbox is well worth the ability to think clearly and focus on what is important.
Seruyange is a software engineer with Vertigo Software Inc.
davids@vertigo.com
INSIGHT: Don"t let newsletters clutter your inbox
