Stephanie Miller from RP blogs at EEC about a UK consumer survey with the take home message: “consumers notice what email marketers do. When we send something interesting and relevant at a good pace, they are happy to stay active with our programs. When we don’t… well, then we’ve lost them, perhaps for good.”
This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam.
Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged address that I only gave to Adobe. Sure enough, it’s Adobe and ESPN co-branded spam about college basketball sent to an Adobe list.
Down at the bottom of the email there’s a blob of tiny illegible text, in very pale grey on white. Buried in there is an opt-out link: “If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please click here to unsusbscribe“.
I’d prefer not to receive college sports spam from anyone, including Adobe, so I click on it and find a big empty white webpage with this in the middle of it:
I have been dealing with a client delivery issue at a major ISP recently. During the course of troubleshooting my client tested mail delivery using a personal email account. This client noticed that email was delivered promptly. He then asked me if it was possible to get the ISP to prioritize his bulk mail over personal email. The short answer is no, ISPs do prioritize one-to-one email over bulk email.
Answering the question for him crystallized some vague thoughts that ended up running through my head at the conference last week. During the conference, and similar email conferences, conference call and any discussion that involves senders and receivers, there is usually little discussion of end users.
End users. Those people who are recipients of the emails that senders send. Those people who are customers of the nreceiver ISPs. End users who are almost never involved in the conversation, but without whom there would not be a conversation. These are the people that really matter. These are who senders need to engage. These are who the receivers need to keep happy.
It is, in fact, the end users who want one-to-one email more than they want bulk mail. Even the best bulk mail is not as engaging as that email from your best friend, or the problem solving with a colleague, or the latest gossip. ISPs know this, and they do not prioritize bulk mail, no matter how well managed and how engaging, over one-to-one mail.
Mark Brownlow released a video earlier this week titled “If B2B marketing emails could talk.” Enjoy.
HT: Mickey