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- People get a lot of email newsletters. Need a way to aggregate them
- Let users register on your website and generate a new email ID
- Users can now use this ID while signing up to various newsletters
- All emails sent to this ID is then consolidated and sent as one email at a frequency of the users’ choice
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Businesses love to “capture” your email address. First, they lure you with something magical (an ebook, a free preview of an anticipated show, VIP access – you name it), and once you have got what you wanted for free, they will continue to nag you till you part with your money.
Except for the really few times when you enjoy, and even eagerly anticipate, the next email from a business you subscribed to, most times – it just sits there cluttering your inbox.
There are of course ways to eliminate this. You could unsubscribe. Or, you could give a temporary email address while signing up. These are fixes that do not solve all of your problems.
Take the example of Netflix’s newsletter. I don’t care what the next trending show on the platform is. So I ignore their emails most of the time. But when the next season of a show I watch is out, I need to know.
The same is true with movie ticket booking websites. You are only interested with some of their emails; not all of them. If you are into real estate, you like these websites pitching some properties, not others. Even regular blogs – some topics are interesting and you want to check them out. Others are meh.
So the point is this – you are subscribed to dozens of newsletters simply because you fear missing out on some cool thing that may come up once in a while. Most other times – the email simply gets deleted or archived.
There is a better way to organize your emails and bring clutter down – Aggregated mailing lists.
This is how it works. When you sign up to this aggregated newsletter service, you will be given an email address of your own. You now give this email address to the various websites while signing up.
What this service now does is that it aggregates all the newsletters being sent to you into one ‘digest’ that gets delivered to your inbox at a frequency of your choice – daily, weekly or even monthly.
This way, you don’t get a hundred emails each week. Instead, all of that is condensed into one digest that you can look at and see what’s interesting and what’s not. Like something? Click on the link and read the mail in its entirety. Or else, skip.
There is however a challenge here. Most times, you do not start off subscribing to a newsletter. With Netflix again, the email they send their mailers to is the one you gave them while signing up. You get a lot of transactional messages too on this address – email verification, password change, personal message alerts, and so on.
You do not want to wait until the week is over before you can click on that verification email. So for this, you need this service to be “smart”, in that it knows when the message is transactional and when it is a marketing mailer.
Essentially, if the email you receive contains an ‘Unsubscribe’ button, it is a marketing mail. Other times it is transactional.
Regardless of this, your service can come with a web-based inbox that users can log into and check all the latest emails – just like they would on their own Gmail inbox. So even if the service gets the classification wrong, users will always be able to access messages in real time, if required.
So if it is all this good, why have I not gone ahead and built this platform myself? That’s because there are a few challenges that still need to be addressed.
Firstly, there is the issue with security – building a platform like this is no less than building Gmail. If you use this service to handle your Netflix and Amex newsletters, do know that even password informations get routed through this platform. How do you make sure that hackers don’t get access to all your user emails?
Secondly, businesses do not want you to use this service that will make their email marketing campaigns less effective. So the moment this takes off, be ready for every other platform to ban email addresses from this service. This is always going to be a cat-and-mouse game where you buy new domain names to create email addresses on, only for it to be suspended, and you having to start the process again.
But while these challenges exist, they are not unsurmountable. And for this reason, I think this is an idea that is worth pursuing. What do you think?
