I recently signed up for traffic alerts from Traffic.com. Ostensibly interesting and useful, in reality, totally worthless. They don’t put any information in the subject line of the email and as a result I have to click on each one to see it. Given that most days traffic alerts contain no new information (i.e. usual traffic volume), the alerts get annoying very quickly. While this strategy may inflate open rates in the short term, I’ve got to imagine it leads to higher than usual unsubscribe rates.

If Traffic.com put a summary of the message in the subject line with more details in the body, I would have been much more likely to continue with my subscription. This isn’t hard to do, it just requires putting the user first.