(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you’ll pay for that item nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)
By the author of The Ultimate Guide to Frugal Living and What to Eat When You’re Broke
If your email is anything like mine, it’s absolutely loaded with messages encouraging you to buy stuff. It tells you about new stuff that you just might like, things that vendors are positive you need, and the latest sales from your favorite stores.
Honestly, your email can be a thousand times worse than the most persuasively displayed shopping mall when it comes to getting you to want to spend money because, often, you don’t even need to leave your home to get the goods.
My email was ripe for a good decluttering.
On Saturday, I was scrolling through my messages, searching between all the advertisements for the personal messages from friends and family. I got sidetracked several times when I saw things that I wanted, or that seemed like a great deal…and then I slammed on the mental brakes.
What on earth was I doing, inviting all this temptation into my inbox?
There were messages from…
- The grocery store with daily sales
- Kohls with their delightful fall clothing specials
- Wayfair, who is convinced I need a dining table after I made the mistake of clicking on one on Pinterest the other day
- The salon where I got my hair done once, offering me a coupon to come back and see them again
- Amazon, with about a half a dozen tempting offers for books from my favorite authors
- Dominos Pizza, who doesn’t want me to have to cook tonight
- Fly Lady, who sincerely believes her cleaning products will make my life easier
- Martha Stewart, whose organizational tools could probably change my life
And that was enough to make me say, “I gotta go scorched earth on this email!
It was hard, though. I have gotten a lot of great coupons from a lot of my favorite stores via email. I have been notified of awesome grocery stock up sales via email.
I learn when books by my favorite authors come out…you guessed it…via email.
But the questions I had to ask myself were these:
- Am I saving more than I’m spending with all of these emails?
- Am I yearning for things I don’t actually need with all these emails?
- Am I less satisfied with the things I have because of all these emails? And the answer to all three questions was yes. *sad face*
How to get rid of unwanted emails.
The time had come. I had to go scorched-earth for the sake of my budget and my happiness.
There are a few ways to clean out your inbox.
There are tools like Unroll.me and Mailstrom that make it super easy to get rid of the unwanted clutter in your email. Do be aware that there are some privacy concerns with this, so if you use your email for anything sensitive, you should do it manually instead. As well, remember the adage that if a service is free, YOU are the product. When these services snoop through your email, your data will be scraped and sold to the highest bidder.
Some folks don’t mind this. Other folks do. It’s totally up to you.
The other thing you can do is do it manually. This is what I did. When I sat down to watch some Netflix with the fam, I opened up my inbox (22,000+ messages, holy cow!) and I began unsubscribing from everyone who was trying to sell me stuff. It took me about an hour to get through it all, but it was time that I would have spent doing nothing productive, so I didn’t mind.
A quick note: You can always find a link to unsubscribe near the bottom of your email. As someone who sends out emails on a regular basis for business purposes, I strongly urge you to do this instead of marking them as spam.
Spam is for things you never signed up for or things you unsubscribed from but they refuse to get a hint. It really hurts businesses who send email to be marked as spam because it means that sometimes other folks who actually want the email must go digging through their spam folders to find it, and too many complaints can cause the service to refuse to work with you anymore. I know, this is personal, but I hope you’ll consider what I’m saying here.
Who gets to stay in your inbox?
There are a couple of places that send me truly good deals for things I need, so those folks got to stay. And don’t unsubscribe from us, of course!
There were some places that sent extremely informative emails that linked me to interesting blog posts. Sure, they sell a few things here and there, but the value I got from their emails was worth it.
When it comes time to do some shopping for some reason (maybe at Christmas and Black Friday and when my daughter goes job-hunting and needs clothing) there are a few places I will re-subscribe to in order to get coupons. But as soon as my shopping is done, they’re history yet again!
So…set aside some time and get to unsubscribing!
What are your thoughts?
Is your inbox causing you to spend money you shouldn’t? Are you trading your address for discounts but then continuing to receive emails? How do you manage the barrage of sales emails?
Let’s talk about it in the comments section.
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, adventure-seeking, globe-trotting blogger. She is the founder and publisher of three websites. 1) The Organic Prepper, which is about current events, preparedness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of liberty; 2) The Frugalite, a website with thrifty tips and solutions to help people get a handle on their personal finances without feeling deprived; and 3) PreppersDailyNews.com, an aggregate site where you can find links to all the most important news for those who wish to be prepared. Her work is widely republished across alternative media and she has appeared in many interviews.
Daisy is the best-selling author of 5 traditionally published books, 12 self-published books, and runs a small digital publishing company with PDF guides, printables, and courses at SelfRelianceand Survival.com You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, Gab, MeWe, Parler, Instagram, and Twitter.
3 thoughts on “Save a Fortune by Hitting UNSUBSCRIBE on Email Newsletters”
Some additional strategies worth mentioning might include these:
1. When doing product searches (especially if you think this is a one-time-only product event, and especially if you’re running such a search for a friend, eg), use a different browser than the one where you do most of your email activities.
2. Run an online search on disposable / throwaway / temporary use email services so you’ll have those handy for any product website that demands an email address from you. If later you decide you really want to stay on their mailing list, just update to your more permanent email address(s).
3. In cases of politically dangerous or just politically incorrect product or service inquiries or orders, beware of using all-seeing / all-snooping email systems like Google’s Gmail. For example, if you were to order a training info package on how to build a completely legal ghost gun of whatever type and caliber, there’s a high probability that the seller will email you a receipt that describes what they’re shipping to you in sufficient detail that you would not want available to Gmail and their NSA snoops to keyword-sniff and track you for reasons you wouldn’t like. Much better to use a disposable email address and perhaps even a delivery destination (if there’s any physical product involved) that’s not obviously tied to your real name.
Be aware that sometimes you may run into a seller whose ordering software might reject some email addresses (such as one offshore email service I have) as “invalid” even if it easily handles 98% of other email communications all seven days of the week year around.
–Lewis
I am in the process of doing this very thing. With so much clutter I sometimes miss the important emails.
Some days I find myself unsubscribing to as many emails as I actually read. Also, I’m finding that some of my favorite sites – one doctor in particular, is offering at least one product a week that will ‘make me healthier’ – so those are also going.