I found a blog post from a technical type talking about email engagement. This is a non-marketing way to do things, and probably won’t work for many marketing programs. But I think good marketers should be listening to what their recipients say, even if it’s counter-intuitive.
Edit 9/15: the website seems to have expired so I changed the link to the google cache of the article.
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.
A great post by the always insightful Mark Brownlow. Why Value Matters
I initially posted this because I found his illustrations very amusing. But then I thought about a number of conversations I had last week. Many of us in the email marketing arena can’t think like our recipients. We just don’t.
I think, sometimes, our inability to see email except as marketing can hamper our ability to connect with users. We spend so much time analyzing email we don’t always remember that it’s a tool. That there is an actual person at the other end of the transaction.
Marketers measure email campaigns primarily by dollars. And maybe there’s no other way to measure them. But, I can’t help but think that maybe we’re missing something.
And I think Mark may have hit that particular bullseye.
A few months ago I got email from Staff of Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, to an addresses scraped off one of my websites. At the bottom it says:
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