Remember that feeling of getting a handwritten letter? You were excited to open it, right? Even e-mail used to be like that – remember AOL’s familiar cry: “You’ve got mail!”
Not anymore. Email, while useful, has become a chore that we have to manage. We have to figure out how to separate the important email from the unimportant. We have to prevent harmful email from entering our inbox. And the sheer volume of it begins to wear us down. This is the environment in which we marketers send millions of messages. So it’s worth looking at what’s happening with email as a marketing tool and what to be aware of as it evolves.
Decreasing Impact
As we all send and receive more email, the effectiveness of the medium as a marketing tool is decreasing – like it does with all marketing venues as they become saturated with messaging. Personally, I’ve seen open rates decrease over the last year. Research from Marketing Sherpa reinforces my experience. In their 2008 Email Marketing Benchmark Study, email marketers reported their number one concern is “inbox overload” which leads to reduced open rates and reduced attention toward all email messages.
Related to this is how email recipients think about the messages they receive. We’d all agree that messages we didn’t sign up for are “spam.” But the Marketing Sherpa study says that 56% of those surveyed also classified messages “that are just not interesting to me” as spam. Wow. The bar has been raised. Users not only want to get only messages they opt-in for, they also want information that they find interesting. You can’t blame them, but we have to be aware that our job as marketers just got harder.
Have Respect for Your Customers
Email seems to be the most obvious way marketers think about turning website visitors into customers. How often have you heard, “We’ll capture their names and send them our newsletter”? Great! Except that your visitors don’t want to be “captured” and your newsletter offers nothing relevant to them. Think about it from your customers’ perspective. They actually suffer from too much information, not too little, so how is your newsletter really going to help them, and why would they want to get another email? What might they really want? Here are some ideas.
- A significant product discount (available for a limited time)
- Information that is specifically targeted to them based on their past behavior
- News that’s worth knowing like the launch date for a great new product
- A chance to weigh in with their opinion as you develop a new product or program
- Something that makes them laugh –have you seen the JC Penney “husband in the dog house” promotion? Ready for a laugh? http://tiny.cc/6BO5y
These thoughts are not meant to suggest that e-mail marketing should not be considered, just that it should be carefully planned with your customers’ needs in mind. Take pity on them- they probably get as much email as you do!
E-mail Marketing – Serve Steak instead of Spam
Remember that feeling of getting a handwritten letter? You were excited to open it, right? Even e-mail used to be like that – remember AOL’s familiar cry: “You’ve got mail!”
Not anymore. Email, while useful, has become a chore that we have to manage. We have to figure out how to separate the important email from the unimportant. We have to prevent harmful email from entering our inbox. And the sheer volume of it begins to wear us down. This is the environment in which we marketers send millions of messages. So it’s worth looking at what’s happening with email as a marketing tool and what to be aware of as it evolves.
Decreasing Impact
As we all send and receive more email, the effectiveness of the medium as a marketing tool is decreasing – like it does with all marketing venues as they become saturated with messaging. Personally, I’ve seen open rates decrease over the last year. Research from Marketing Sherpa reinforces my experience. In their 2008 Email Marketing Benchmark Study, email marketers reported their number one concern is “inbox overload” which leads to reduced open rates and reduced attention toward all email messages.
Related to this is how email recipients think about the messages they receive. We’d all agree that messages we didn’t sign up for are “spam.” But the Marketing Sherpa study says that 56% of those surveyed also classified messages “that are just not interesting to me” as spam. Wow. The bar has been raised. Users not only want to get only messages they opt-in for, they also want information that they find interesting. You can’t blame them, but we have to be aware that our job as marketers just got harder.
Have Respect for Your Customers
Email seems to be the most obvious way marketers think about turning website visitors into customers. How often have you heard, “We’ll capture their names and send them our newsletter”? Great! Except that your visitors don’t want to be “captured” and your newsletter offers nothing relevant to them. Think about it from your customers’ perspective. They actually suffer from too much information, not too little, so how is your newsletter really going to help them, and why would they want to get another email? What might they really want? Here are some ideas.
- A significant product discount (available for a limited time)
- Information that is specifically targeted to them based on their past behavior
- News that’s worth knowing like the launch date for a great new product
- A chance to weigh in with their opinion as you develop a new product or program
- Something that makes them laugh –have you seen the JC Penney “husband in the dog house” promotion? Ready for a laugh? http://tiny.cc/6BO5y
These thoughts are not meant to suggest that e-mail marketing should not be considered, just that it should be carefully planned with your customers’ needs in mind. Take pity on them- they probably get as much email as you do!