How To Make It Into My Inbox Without Getting Marked As Spam

May 19 2009 View Comments

stumbleupon logo A few days ago while doing some cleanup on my StumbleUpon profile, I opted in for StumbleUpon to email me recommendations. StumbleUpon is great for finding articles, sites, and all sorts of neat things across the web. However, I’m getting to a point where I submit content to StumbleUpon for others to discover, but I don’t have enough time to see what others in the community are stumbling. Since I use the service often and find value in it, I opted into being emailed recommendations.

Today, I received my first StumbleUpon recommendation email. The email consisted of about 4 rows of recommended sites and 2 rows of the popular sites of the week on StumbleUpon. While visually appealing, overall I was disappointed in what I received.

StumbleUpon

Make It Easy For Me

Above is a screenshot of the email I received. Quite frankly, there’s entirely too much information missing for me to even want to look at another email like this. I can’t see the value of this email and I’m itching to unsubscribe. So how can StumbleUpon improve it? Here are 4 suggestions:

Improve Amount of Site Information – What’s the name of the site? What categories has it been tagged under? Other than a screenshot or image from the site and some text there’s not much to go off that would motivate me to click-through to any of the recommended sites. The Download Squad is the only recommended site I thought to visit because I’m already familiar with the work of the good folks over at DS. I have no idea what those other sites are about or if they’re even trustworthy. Sorry, the headline titles at the bottom of each thumbnail just isn’t enough information for me.

Display Content Reviews – Where are the reviews of the sites that StumbleUpon is recommending? While I’m more than happy to make up my own mind, I’d love to see what others have said about certain sites or how many people recommended/stumbled a site without leaving my inbox. This helps me to quickly figure out whether a recommendation is revelant based on community ratings and reviews.

Show Related Stumbles – What sites have I stumbled that led to the recommendations I’m receiving? I have no idea where StumbleUpon is getting their recommendations from and none of them are fitting the sites my interests. Now I’m left wondering where these recommendations are coming from. Are they from site’s I’ve stumbled? My network of friends? The bogey man?

Recommend Content From StumbleUpon Friends – Are my friends stumbling these recommended sites? If not, StumbleUpon would be wise to recommend some of the articles my friends are stumbling. StumbleUpon has always seemed a bit like a one-man’s game to me. Pulling my friend’s stumbles into the mix not only adds value to the content because it’s from a trusted group of people, but it also helps me to interact with my friends outside of that toolbar.

Missing Value

chat

These features and enhancements to the emails could help increase my activity and interaction on StumbleUpon, while adding a little more value to the service. For now, I’d rather stick with the StumbleUpon toolbar. The email will only keep me in my inbox longer than I want to be. It requires too much work on my part to quickly find the most value in the recommended sites , which should be the goal of the email.

Nevertheless, I do hope to see the emails improve because they could be a quick source of good information for bloggers and those that don’t have the time to stumble through the entire web.