Volume! Volume! Volume!

V

Saw a series of tweets this morning from random consumers about holiday marketing volume.

Some of the vendors I follow have gotten a little desperate. I’m getting an average of three emails a day saying “BUY OUR SHIT.”
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) December 14, 2012

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  • Well, I think there is a way to do it that works. Sending lots of mail isn’t the problem. Sending lots of mail your recipients aren’t interested in getting is the problem. The Obama campaign, for instance, sent lots and lots of mails. Their list was an order of magnitude larger than the Romney campaign and there were days they were sending 10s of mails per subscriber. It was a deluge. But they were smart, and they did a lot of data mining and they did it in a way that got recipients to act on the mail. That mail was a deluge, but it was a wanted deluge by most of the receivers.
    For a lot of vendors, too, increasing volume does increase response and revenue and all the things you want to drive with email marketing. It’s even very possible that the vendors being complained about on twitter are actually not annoying the majority of their recipient base. But there will be people who don’t like it. If they’re not valuable customers, no great loss.
    It’s not the volume, it’s how unwanted the mail is. Send wanted mail, you can send dozens of times a day. Naively many of us thought that we could measure wanted with permission. And if only people had permission to send mail then there wouldn’t be a problem with unwanted volume. It’s a much more complex landscape 15 years on. A lot of this unwanted mail has permission, in that the recipients signed up to receive mail from that sender. But that’s not always enough.
    (I think I came up with at least 4 themes to blog on in this comment.)

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