Sirius-ly Wrong

I got an email from Sirius, the satellite radio company, the other day. I'm a customer, so it's not wrong for me to hear from them. The header read "Invitation to give SIRIUS your opinions in future surveys."

Based on that headline, you might think you were being invited to join a group of customers who would participate in research surveys to help Sirius understand their customers' preferences. That's a perfectly fine thing for them to do.

But that's not quite what they're doing:

Our research partners may contact you via e-mail to help enhance our programming, service, and other offerings. There is no obligation to participate, but we would like to be able to check in with you occasionally to see if you have a minute to answer a few questions about your service

If you would prefer not to participate in these e-mail surveys, please click on the link below to let us know you do NOT want to participate in email surveys from SIRIUS.

So, no, it's not an invitation to particpate. It's a notice that Sirius is going to give their partners your email address and you're going to hear from them unless you opt out. Which is not acceptable behavior. My response is to tell Sirius that they do not have my permission to send me any kind of email about anything, ever.

It's great example of how not to use email to talk to your customers.