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FBox: The sky isn't falling

Having listened to the Facebook announcement this morning, I am even more convinced that emailpocalypse isn’t happening.
Look, despite the fact that companies like Blue Sky Factory think that this means marketers are NEVER EVER going see the inside of an inbox again this isn’t the end of email marketing.
Yes, Facebook email is a messaging platform that marketers are not going to have direct, unlimited and unfettered access to. I have no problem with this. Unfettered access to a messaging platform has been abused by marketers long enough, that I heartily approve of a platform that gives real control back to the recipient.
With that being said, there are a couple blindingly obvious ways to avoid having to give users control of their own inbox.

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Blasting the message!

Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice.

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Attention is a limited resource

Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

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