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LinkedIn users who feel like they get too many emails from the site may catch a break soon.
A new email and notifications platform called Air Traffic Controller (ATC) is designed to better determine the frequency and types of emails and other messages that LinkedIn sends you, according to a company blog post on Tuesday from director of engineering growth Erica Lockheimer. The platform uses learning algorithms to follow your interactions with LinkedIn and fine-tunes the notifications it sends out.
LinkedIn’s primary function is to network you with other professionals to further your career. But the site can be intrusive because it can send email notifications for everything from a new post by someone you follow to a change in someone’s status to a new group discussion. You can tinker with the settings, but the process is cumbersome.
LinkedIn has made progress in addressing user complaints. The number of complaints about email and notifications has dropped by 65 percent over the past year, a LinkedIn spokesperson said. The emails you’ve received in the last several months should already be less frequent and more relevant, Lockheimer noted in the blog, but further improvements are on the way.
ATC has been built to learn the best time to send you notifications and the best method, be it email or instant message. Certain notifications will also be packaged together rather than sent separately. As one example cited in the blog, LinkedIn members used to receive a separate email for every invitation to connect with someone. Now if members get a hefty number of invites in a row, they’ll be rolled into a single email.
As further tweaks, LinkedIn will limit the number of emails and notifications it sends to people who are on the site more frequently. It will also place daily and monthly limits on notifications, so people don’t feel like they’re being bombarded.
“ATC will help us create a more personalized experience on LinkedIn for everyone,” Lockheimer said in her blog post. “We realize that a one-size-fits-all method doesn’t work. We want to give you emails and notifications based on what your prefer, not what’s best for us.”
