When Email Gets Ugly

It's an sad fact that too many companies don't think much about email marketing until they really need something to happen and fast. For retailers, that's often the Christmas season. Sales aren't quite what they should be? Need to get some orders quick? Okay, ratchet up the email marketing!

Unfortunately, it often doesn't work; or, if it does, there's a price to pay. Here's a comment on holiday season email from the blog of someone who's not a marketer; he's just somebody who buys a lot of stuff online. Read it and see the problem with suddenly shooting out lots of messages when you've been using the email list lightly all year.

Here's the really interesting part: the two retailers he's complaining about, Brookstone and Red Envolope, are not "junk mailers." These are companies he likes and he's been buying stuff from. But they're turning him off with the sudden end of year rush.

The messages he's been getting are not, he tells me, anything particularly relevant. Yes, he's a regular customer of both companies, so they're not completely irrelevant. But neither are they something useful. For example, if Red Envelope sent a message saying, "Click here to get a list of everyone you bought gifts for last holiday season; you'll find suggestions of items those people are likely to enjoy based on your previous gifts, and we'll give you a discount if you order in the next week," there would be some value to it. Instead it's a slightly desparate "hey! look! more stuff!" approach.

Note this line in his blog post: "I am so sick of seeing them in my inbox. Yet I cannot mark them as spam since I buy stuff from them and don't want purchase-related messages trashed." Congratulations to these retailers: they've taken a regular customer, and made him wish he could filter their messages as spam without missing something important.

I can guarantee that other customers just marked them as spam anyway, or have simply stopped opening and reading their messages.

This isn't the promise of email marketing: closer customer relationships that yield more sales and more profit. Marketing that deepends customer relationships. No, this is email marketing as a new way to annoy people. It's not likely to pay off.