Don’t Be Like Heroku

Heroku, the cloud hosting platform that used to be kind of nice but after being purchased by Salesforce is a shadow of itself, sends me emails. I had an account for a previous consulting client, and even though they are moved off of Heroku my email is still on some mailing list. I try to be good about unsubscribing to things I don’t want to keep my inbox focused so I decided to finally kill this Heroku newsletter.

To start, there isn’t an unsubscribe link anywhere on the email, just a “manage preferences” link. Strike one.

Here are strikes two and three:

Don’t do this. I know there’s some marketing person in your ear telling you that you have to do these stupid tricks to keep your newsletter email list as long as possible, but what’s the point if they are only there because you tricked them?

Maybe tell the marketing person to write a better newsletter? Maybe send it less often?

Dark patterns like this aren’t helping you. They are making you look bad to your smartest customers.