Standing in the stadium

If you distill marketing down to its very essence what you find is everyone battling for a targets attention. Everything marketers do is to get “mindshare” or, in normal people terms, attention. The goal is to get people to remember your product over all the other products out there.
Many email marketers seem to think that increasing the frequency of mail is the most successful way to get attention from their recipients. What would happen, then, if every email marketer started sending more email? Would this really get more attention from recipients?
I don’t think so.
Increasing mail frequency is like standing up to see better in a stadium. One person stands up (increases frequency) and that person sees better than they did before. But if everyone stands up (increases frequency), then everyone is back to where they were and everyone is back to not being able to see.

The myth of the low complaint rate
Comments on Holomaxx post

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Don't be Amelia

I have an adorable cat that I ‘taught’ that I would pet her if she tapped me on the arm or shoulder with her paw. It was cute for a while, but then she got more and more demanding. Eventually, she was clawing at my clothes and skin to get attention and petting.
It’s gotten to the point where I have to put a stop to it. She’s just getting too destructive to me and my clothing. So over the last two weeks I’ve been trying to only reward those touches that don’t involve claws and giving her a stern “NO CLAWS” when she does try to claw me.
As I was sitting here this afternoon, going through yet another round of NO CLAWS with her, I realized that my interactions with her were eerily similar to email marketing.
You see, Amelia started using her claws to get my attention because I didn’t always respond to her gentle taps. But claws hurt, and were a problem, so I would respond. This is exactly like marketers who don’t see a response to their email marketing campaigns and thus up the aggressiveness of those campaigns. More mail, more frequency, stronger offers, anything to get a response out of recipients.
Eventually, though, the recipient finally gets annoyed. The aggressive “taps” result in spam complaints. The sender has pushed the recipient from “it’s not so bad” to “make this sender stop bugging me.”
Email marketing is interruption marketing and there is only so much recipients will tolerate. And, trust me, few email marketers are as cute as my Amelia Cat.

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The return of the Magill Report

After a 6 month hiatus, Ken Magill has returned to offer his insightful, and somewhat snarky, take on email marketing. You can subscribe at The Magill Report.
Ken is really trying to make this report an example of how to do ad supported email newsletters right. When I subscribed yesterday I received the following welcome message:

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It's not illegal to block mail

My post “We’re going to party like it’s 1996” is still getting a lot of comments from people. Based on the comments, either people aren’t reading or my premise wasn’t clear.
Back in 1996 the first lawsuits were brought against ISPs to stop ISPs from blocking email. These suits were failures. Since that time, other senders have attempted to sue ISPs and lost. Laws have been written protecting the rights of the ISPs to block content they deem to be harmful.
Dela says that he was just attempting to open up a conversation, but I don’t see what he thinks the  conversation is. That ISPs shouldn’t block mail their customers want? Sure, OK. We’re agreed on that. Now, define what mail recipients want. I want what mail I want, not what someone else decides I might want.
Marketers need to get over the belief that they own end users mailboxes and that they have some right to send mail to people. You don’t.
When marketers actually start sending wanted mail, to people who actually subscribe – not just make a purchase, or register online or happen to have an easily discoverable email address – then perhaps marketers will have some standing to claim they are being treated illegally. Until and unless that happens, the ISPs are well within their rights to block mail that their users don’t want.

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