Saw a series of tweets this morning from random consumers about holiday marketing volume.
Some of the vendors I follow have gotten a little desperate. I’m getting an average of three emails a day saying “BUY OUR SHIT.”
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) December 14, 2012
Sadly, this has resulted in the inverse of their intent: I am now not buying anything from any of them until the New Year.
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) December 14, 2012
@seananmcguire The same here. I get that the holidays are make or break for some businesses, but more than 1 email a day is excessive.
— AJ Reardon (@erthefae) December 14, 2012
@erthefae I’m not talking Etsy sellers here.I mean like, big stores.
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) December 14, 2012
@seananmcguire Do you perhaps mean Threadless? Because if they send me one more dang e-mail about 9.99 t-shirts…
— AJ Reardon (@erthefae) December 14, 2012
@seananmcguire I’d say I can’t wait for Christmas, except that will start the “Didn’t get what you wanted under the tree? Buy it now” mails.
— AJ Reardon (@erthefae) December 14, 2012
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Deluge Marketing is still not working.
Well, I think there is a way to do it that works. Sending lots of mail isn’t the problem. Sending lots of mail your recipients aren’t interested in getting is the problem. The Obama campaign, for instance, sent lots and lots of mails. Their list was an order of magnitude larger than the Romney campaign and there were days they were sending 10s of mails per subscriber. It was a deluge. But they were smart, and they did a lot of data mining and they did it in a way that got recipients to act on the mail. That mail was a deluge, but it was a wanted deluge by most of the receivers.
For a lot of vendors, too, increasing volume does increase response and revenue and all the things you want to drive with email marketing. It’s even very possible that the vendors being complained about on twitter are actually not annoying the majority of their recipient base. But there will be people who don’t like it. If they’re not valuable customers, no great loss.
It’s not the volume, it’s how unwanted the mail is. Send wanted mail, you can send dozens of times a day. Naively many of us thought that we could measure wanted with permission. And if only people had permission to send mail then there wouldn’t be a problem with unwanted volume. It’s a much more complex landscape 15 years on. A lot of this unwanted mail has permission, in that the recipients signed up to receive mail from that sender. But that’s not always enough.
(I think I came up with at least 4 themes to blog on in this comment.)
[…] not even during the Christmas season. Apparently other people feel the same way, judging from a recent thread on Twitter that Laura Atkins mentioned on her blog Word to the […]