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Friday 30 March 2012

Unroll.me Combines Your Favorite Email Subscriptions Into One, Lets You Kill The Rest


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Suffering from inbox overload? Of course you are – everyone is. And now thanks to Google’s Account Activity report, we can see exactly how much email we get. It’s scary. From my personal email address, I received 9,000+ emails last month. (Haven’t checked out my TechCrunch address, though…) It’s reasons like this that draw me to email-improving startups, whether mobile apps, CRM tools, filtering products, etc. Email needs to get better.
One such startup, Unroll.me (still in private beta), previously allowed you to unsubscribe from mailing lists from an online dashboard. But recently, it launched a tool that aggregates all your subscriptions into one daily “roll-up” email that contains everything you still want to read – for example, all those Groupons, your social media updates, newsletters, company news blasts, and more. And it’s sent on a schedule you configure.
The startup has been dishing out invites here and there (yep, yours are below), and has starting seeing some pickup during its private beta. When first launched, Unroll.me allowed you to sign through your email account (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL), see a list of subscriptions, and click those you want to unsubscribe from. That’s it.
The new version now available offers a more polished dashboard where you can see your subscriptions and then unsubscribe and resubscribe at will. (Sounds like a feature email clients should have, doesn’t it?) This way, if you’re planning a trip, you can switch on your travel newsletters and deals, for example. If you’re in the market for a new flatscreen TV, you could turn on Best Buy’s email for a while. Of course, you could do this by unsubscribing/resubscribing at the company’s website, too, but this way is far easier.*
*Except for one thing – they’re marketing the startup by forcing you to share with friends (via email, Facebook or Twitter) in order to unsubscribe from more than five newsletters. Bleh. 

From the beta, a little data on the service’s users:
Unroll.me found that the average user on their system has 104 subscription emails and generally unsubscribes from 18 of them. The top five most popular email subscriptions are mainly those from social networks (updates, messages, etc.). The list includes: Facebook (66.49% of users have it), LinkedIn (59.94%), Twitter (55.22%), Pinterest (35.71%) and then Groupon (34.12%).
Meanwhile, the top five most unsubscribed lists are Spotify News (33.47% ditch it), Formspring (28.11% drop it), TicketMaster (23.30% drop), Best Buy (23.15%) and LivingSocial Escapes (17.4%).
In addition to the new dashboard, Unroll.me also now offers an option that bundles your subscriptions into one daily email called the “roll-up.” You can customize this email with just those subscriptions you want to read, which you can change at any time.
“Most users, after unsubscribing, still have 70-plus subscriptions in their inboxes,” explains Unroll.me co-founder Jojo Hedaya, ”so we allow them to add the subscriptions to a digest email that comes from Unroll.me at the time of their choosing…instead of receiving the 20 subscription emails you get harassed with all day, you can receive one email at 8 PM with all the activity.”
The time of day is customizable, of course, as is the content.
The feature has another interesting component, too: personalized recommendations. The startup will suggest newsletters you may want to subscribe to – and the funny thing is, now that you only have the one roll-up email hitting your inbox, you might actually do so. Hedaya says the eventual goal is to turn this feature into a newsletter discovery service.
The NYC-based startup was founded by Josh Rosenwald, Jojo Hedaya, Steven Greenberg and Perri Gorman, and is currently bootstrapped while raising its VC round.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/unroll-me-combines-your-favorite-email-subscriptions-into-one-lets-you-kill-the-rest/?grcc=5f3655709b2d33f07573bd52c3868bfbZ8Zhpge

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