Weight Watchers Won’t Stop Emailing Me
By: Julie Samuels
Tags: Corporate Accountability, Privacy Protection, Spam, Email, Marketing

A very interesting thing happened during the summer of 2020. Weight Watchers, aka WW, started emailing me again.

I had been a member of WW many years ago but had left the program and disabled my account when the reality of tracking every morsel of food I put into my mouth became too much. It had, happily, been years since I heard from them, and I was quite happy to go the rest of my life never hearing from them again. I never bought into their rebranding — even Oprah couldn’t persuade me, despite her love of bread, to give it another try.

So, imagine my surprise when one day, completely out of the blue, I heard from them again.

Unsubscribe.

We received your request to unsubscribe. It will take a few weeks to process your request.

Weeks pass. The emails keep coming. I unsubscribe again and again … the emails keep coming.

I tweet at them (9/7/2020): .@ww_us I have unsubscribed from your emails 1K times, and you still send me emails. I don’t want to hear from you. I will never spend $ with you. I send you to spam and you keep coming back. Stop emailing me. #weightwatchers #spam

They DM me (9/7/2020): Thank you for sending us a Direct Message, Julie. We have submitted your request to be unsubscribed from receiving emails from WW. Please allow up to 3 full business weeks to stop receive emails from WW. Once again we apologize for any frustration this may have caused. Wishing you the very best on your journey!

They DM me (9/7/2020): Hi Julie! Our records have you as unsubscribed. We’ve sent an urgent request to our email control center advising them you are unsubscribed but still are receiving emails from us and to have your email address manually removed from our database. As our email campaigns are created in advance, you may continue to receive emails until they get to your request. In the interim, please mark us as Spam or block us. We can not confirm you will stop receiving emails this week as WW Customer Care does not control the process of how emails are sent, but will do everything we can to expedite the process on your behalf.

I DM them (10/3/2020): It is interesting to note that I am still receiving emails from your brand. 3 weeks is long over — this is inexcusable.

They DM me (10/3/2020): Hi, Julie! Thank you for reaching out! Please send us your email address, so we can see what’s going on! We are looking forward to your response. (Note: there is a heart emoji at the end of this sentence. It does not help to placate me, nor does the fact I’ve given them my email address countless times.)

There are multiple messages back and forth between me and the very “happy to help” support team, but, and this is true, to this day I receive an email from WW every.single.day.

I write comments on both Trust Pilot and BBB. This gets someone’s attention.

There is now a woman (who I believe is in WW HQ) who calls me to tell me that she’s working on this, that she doesn’t know why it’s still happening, that she understands how frustrating this must be for me.

It is simply inept that WW cannot figure out how to stop sending me emails.

WW marketing made a conscious decision to mine its old email rolls to perhaps get back those who had left the fold at a time when anyone and everyone can be excused for perhaps eating ice cream for breakfast. WW took advantage of the pandemic to woo people back to their program; somewhere in a Zoom meeting, discussing how to increase revenue, someone had this particular idea, and someone else approved it. That I have retracted my consent to receive emails countless times is irrelevant to them.

This is insidious and destructive corporate behavior.

WW is demonstrating an inexcusable lack of privacy protection, and its email behavior is abusive. At a time when corporate accountability is on the rise, WW should be held accountable.