Dear Email Marketer

OK, maybe I’m special, maybe I’m one of the ‘too savvy to be marketed to’ crowd. Or maybe I’m not, and maybe you’re too self absorbed to realise that the rest of the world isn’t inclined to click the ‘load images, with associated “mark me for more spam” that this implies’ button.

Whatever it is, sending emails that look like this to the AVERAGE recipient is just dumb. OK, back in 2000 we had to send plain text emails (hey I did it too) and we had no idea if they worked or not, other than actually, you know, selling the things we’re telling people about, or putting tracking codes on the link, seeing as how click-through is a pretty good measurement of interest. Then we got this amazing capability to display ‘rich HTML’ messages, when suddenly Thunderbird and Apple Mail and Outlook were cool with displaying HTML emails. So we put those sneaky little web bugs in emails that allowed us to count the open rate (as long as your recipients were looking at the HTML version). Then the developers of email clients got wise, and realised that these sneaky little web bugs were giving their users away so now they warn against loading images in an email and don’t load the images by default.

So who thinks it’s a good idea to send emails wholly comprised of broken images to the vast majority of users? I’m amazed open rates are above 10%. Maybe that just accounts for the curious recipient who wonders just what the hell they’ve been sent. What the hell kind of metric is open rate anyway? The data is muddied by the fact that you don’t even know if your email got past the gatekeeper known as the server-side spam filter, so your open rate relative to number actually delivered is anyone’s guess. If you’re relying on forcing the recipient to acknowledge receipt (because that’s what this is all about isn’t it?) by loading images otherwise they see nothing, then you’re acting out of desperation.

Can we dump the ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ cliché and get back to the idea that when we’re writing an email to our customers or prospects we are talking to human beings. Bulk emails right now are the equivalent of forcing a flier into someone’s hand. It’s supposed to be capable of so much more. Go (re-)read One-to-One Marketing and Permission Marketing if you don’t believe me. You’re supposed to be able to work out from our past interactions what it is I might be interested in. I’ve spent over £1000 with the company that sent me this. I’ve bought numerous products that should allow them to slice and dice me into a specific group, a buyer persona if you will (mountain biker with a taste for high-end light weight components), then write to me almost personally. Instead they send me something about another business unit entirely just because I agreed to be informed of future promotions. My attention is there to be piqued, not abused.

Related posts:

• One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch
• Quit bugging me