Just last week I received the first ever Email newsletter from Safeway. I had used their home delivery once or twice mostly as a novelty to see what it was like. I really didn’t want or need to get correspondence from them, I’m more of a “don’t call me, I’ll call you” type of person, unless of course I intentionally opt in for something. When I did receive the first message from Safeway, I was disturbed to be taken to a website with a login page when I clicked the unsubscribe button. I’ve already written that rule #1 of Email Marketing should be “1 Click Opt out and add me to the “don’t ever send me Email again” list. Obviously me having to login does not meet those criteria, in fact if I’ve forgotten my password (I had) I really don’t want to do a password recovery and waste more time to opt out of this message that is already wasting my time. So what do I do? I took it to Twitter…

The Complaint

Thankfully one of my Twitter friends @katiefelten also RT:

So in all honesty, I had no idea what would occur now. Would Safeway be listening? I had already verified they had a Twitter account. It turns out they  were listening and responded:

Acknowledgement

So that was decent of them, at least they were listening and responded. That is certainly better than nothing, right? So I decided to make another suggestion, just driving the point home so to speak:

Suggestion

The Adjustment

Then I sort of did what I should and forgot all about it. This morning I received another message from Safeway. “Joe, MORE Exclusive Coupons Are Here!” oh snap, I guess I better test the unsubscribe rather than assume they did not listen. Much to my surprise it brought me to a screen where I could easily opt out of all of the newsletters. Here is a partial screenshot:

What can we learn from this?

Ultimately I have to say I am impressed with Safeway’s response and approach. I learned that they are:

Sometimes I feel like Social Media is my only outlet to respond to bad service or poor policies. I really try to go out of my way to help companies that provide good services and products, but on occasion I have written bad reviews on Yelp. I certainly won’t be giving Michael Finney a run for his money, but it’s nice to know that you can have a positive impact in some cases by choosing to exercise your voice in Social Media.

Share YOUR story

Have you used Social Media to influence a similar situation? I’d love to hear your examples in the comment section below.