How not to email spam your customers
Posted in Management Thought on Sep 11th, 2008
Newsletters, eDMs and promotional emails are some of the most cost-effective ways to communicate with your customers. (forget about the web2.0 and social networks, they are still far away from being “regular” marketing vehicles.) But how often should you “spam” your prospects’ inboxes is seemingly a unsolvable myth.
For instance, you want to inform your customers that there will be eight free seminars in Sept. Two will take place at the beginning of the month, three in the middle, the other tree on , say, 9/26, 9/27, 9/30 respectively. As a marketer, you start to ponder when is the right timing to send out the eDM with registration links? And how many waves of sending should I schedule in advance? It takes your time and energy because you don’t want to annoy your valuable opt-in-ed customers with repeated information, but your “marketing instinct” tells you that you should remind them as many times as possible. After all, consumers are forgetful.
All those happen because it a push-based model, not a pull-based model. If customers subscribe to what they really need, a more efficient way to deliver value will save lots of time and money on both sides. So it’s about time to disintegrate content either on an eDM or on a web page into tons of micro-content and offer customers an opportunity to subscribe to any parts they are interested in. As the example above, users can subscribe to just registration links (with optional short description words) and get updated every time when new events go live. The same apply to promos and discounts activities on e-commerce sites (by making only action-required parts rss feeds instead of the whole page). Minimize what you give your audiences and they will focus on what you offer them. Let’s hope that advanced technologies will make this concept come true.
-- Related posts:
