About a week ago, I was googling (I don’t remember what) and on multiple occasions bnet.com results popped up. Site looked nice, content was relevant to my search. Honestly, I don’t even know why I registered at the site… but I did. Maybe there was some protected content that required account. In any event, I signed up.

A successful conversion! Their web + SEO team should feel proud.

July 8

I got 3 email from the site—pretty cool, pushing out some information to me. I note that perhaps it’s “over communication” but a couple of the articles interested me.

July 9

Just one email. Fine.

July 10

4 email! I get enough email in general, and the stuff they’re pushing to me really isn’t relevant, so I decide to unsubscribe. Plus the emails are quite laced with ads. The unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email didn’t work, but finally I figured out how to unsubscribe from the 4 categories of messages. End of story, right? Wrong.

July 11

Today I still got 1 email, so I figure out how to unsubscribe from all CNET email, from a link on the original unsubcribe page, which bnet.com seems to be affiliated with. They say it’ll take 10 days to process my request!

Total brand experience == sucks

My point of all this is how shitty an experience it’s been as a new user of bnet. What it tells me is that the business has not managed the balancing act of “serving the advertisers” vs. “serving the audience.” Their website looks nice, and I had a good experience with it. Their email strategy was horrendous, and I judge them on the “total brand experience.”

Update

Since I started writing this post, 2 more of their email have hit my inbox. I just made my first Gmail filter to automatically delete emails with subject line starting with “BNET Alert”. Side note, the Gmail filter setup process was a great experience. All hail Gmail!