I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes that what works for marketing doesn’t always work for delivery.
For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television advertising is a prime example of this. Companies don’t create new content for every advertising slot, they create one or a few ads and then replay them over and over. The advertiser doesn’t even really care if the consumer consciously ignores the ads. The unconscious connection is still being made.
In the world of email delivery, though, having many or most recipients ignore advertising is the kiss of death. Too many unengaged users and filters decide that mail shouldn’t go into the inbox. These don’t even have to be ISP level filters, but Bayesian filters built into desktop mail clients.
Sending repetitive ads over email may be an effective marketing strategy, but may not be an effective delivery strategy.
Am I off base here and missing something? Tell me I’m wrong in the comments.
Delivery versus marketing
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You are absolutely spot on Laura, what makes for good marketing may hurt inbox placement rates. However good inbox placement is always beneficial to your marketing efforts.
I thought you would get a lot more comments on this because it is absolutely key to email marketing. You have two conflicting pressures and getting the analysis, segmentation and business intelligence correct so that you can meximise the effectiveness of your (email) marketing campaigns is important.
There are diminishing returns on repetitions, but there are additional returns. Finding the sweet-spot of perfection is probably impossible, but some simple analysis on your lists will help you identify whether two mailings are better than one, and whether three mailings are better or worse than than two.
The beauty of email marketing and e-crm integration is that we can establish scenarios based on customer behavior and their interaction with e-mails and other channels. Repeating the same message is boring and useless. Getting customer attention couldn’t be driven by pressure, instead marketers should focus on behavioral targeting. Retargeting is a good way to lead customers to take actions, again without putting too much pressure.
Some marketers seem to forget that the most compellingly crafted campaign in the world is worth nothing if it’s not seen by the recipients.
[…] while ago I wrote some thoughts about the conflicting requirements of delivery and marketing. I posted something similar over on the Only Influencers list, too. My thoughts generated a very […]