Frequency and Relevance: Insight from Actual Recipients

Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC.
Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing.
Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence.
 

Huey:I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post.
Huey:About engagement, now that you mention it.
Laura:yes?
Huey:Why isn’t ‘engagement’ part of opting in? Why isn’t it a preference that the user can set?
• Stevecocks head
Huey:Having just now deleted the third LinkedIn email of the day, and previously gone on a f**king tear about Verizon-
Steve:Oh.
Steve:Yes.
Huey:Let’s look at organizations I interact with.
Huey:Facebook.
Steve:I get what you mean, but I don’t think “engagement” is the word. That’s more a metric than a choice.
Huey:I keep facebook open in a tab that’s near the top. And even when I’m KVMed into the other computer, Facebook is still live and scrolling on the computer I’m not using.
Huey:Why? Because Facebook has interesting things to tell me, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Huey:On the other hand: …how often do I need to hear from LinkedIn?
Huey:For me, once a month would be fine.
Huey:Not three f**king times a day, that’s for sure.
Steve:“Frequency” or something. “Things about your company I give a sh*t about”.
Huey:How often do I need to hear from Verizon?
Huey:How ’bout ‘Never’? Does ‘never’ work for you?
Huey:Seems to me that the business of capturing ‘engagement’ would be easier if the customer was engaged in the engagening.
Laura:Sadly, they don’t
Huey:“How often do you expect to hear from us?”
Laura:and linked in has a pretty extensive preference center
Laura:that lets you pick days or weeks or no mail
Laura:they don’t == users don’t engage with preference centers very much.
Huey:Honestly, LinkedIn haven’t annoyed me enough to go looking for it yet.
Steve:Linked-in doesn’t even have working unsub links.
Laura:and, yet, they’re pissing off some of their users by unsubbing people who don’t click on group links
Huey:On the other hand, if Verizon’s webpage had a button for “Kill all of you with a shovel”, I would write a bot that clicked that nonstop.
Steve:Click. Get challenged to log in. Log in. Get sent to page that doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe. Click around a bit. Find something mentioning email. Still no clue as to how to stop the f**king email.
Steve:(Feel free to use that quote)
Steve:When your recipients view you like that, every mail sent is a potential sales opportunity doused with gasoline and set on fire.
Huey:I would put out that fire.
Huey:By beating it vigorously with a shovel.
Huey:I’ve got a really nice six-foot oak-handled dirt spade that I could totally kill somebody with.
Huey:SEND ME A VERIZON SALESMAN.
Huey:…and if I sat down and thought about it for half an hour or so, I could probably come up with something coherent about engagement that didn’t include the vision of me clubbing a verizon salesbag to death with a shovel.
Huey:(which I’m guessing might be a deal-killer for the professional blog)
Steve:Nope. If it’s OK with you, I’m planning on taking this gentle chat and (after some light editing consisting moistly of s/f**king/f**king/) posting it tomorrow as “Insight from actual recipients”.
Huey:although I may still need to use the words “Seriously, Verizon: STFU and GTFO”.
Huey:Oh, very well then. Feel free to characterize me as a shovel-wielding homicidal maniac.
Laura:🙂
Steve:It’s Verizon. People will empathize.

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Discussion lists sending reminders is a close parallel to our usual recommendations for bulk mailing lists to send something at least monthly, so that recipients remember who you are and that they’re subscribed – and so that recipients who have vanished bounce that mail, so you can eventually remove them from your mailing list. (We’re not suggesting that you send a “this is a reminder” mail monthly – create some real content and send that).
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Training recipients

Want to see a WWF style smackdown? Put a marketer and a delivery expert in a room and ask them to discuss frequency and whether or not more mail is better.
The marketer will point to the bottom line and how much more money they make when they increase frequency. The delivery expert will point to inbox rates and user engagement and point out that too much mail drives users to ignore the mail.
This isn’t actually unique to marketing mail. Send a lot of mail that doesn’t engage recipients and recipients are trained that they don’t have to actually pay attention to the mail. Some of them hit delete. Some may even report the mail as spam.
According to Cloudmark, this is exactly what happened when LinkedIn informed users of the recent data breach. They estimate that up to 4% of users who received the fully DKIM authenticated mail about the data breach deleted it immediately without reading it. This is higher than notification emails from other social networks.

Cloudmark suggests that part of the problem is that LinkedIn has an unclear opt-in process. Instead of asking users for preferences, LinkedIn assumes that all users want all the mail LinkedIn cares to send them. Then LinkedIn makes it difficult to find the page to change mail settings. This means recipients are very trained to ignore mail from LinkedIn. I know I ignore most of it. Anything that’s not a “want to connect” gets filed in the “I’ll read it when I’m bored” mailbox. So far I’ve not been bored enough to read any of it.
But I’m not sure it’s just about too much email. LinkedIn is a company that is heavily forged in phishing mail. Since May 1, just one of my email addresses has received over 50 messages purporting to be from LinkedIn.

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