So here it is, Merry Christmas!

Almost every one of us will have been inundated with ‘season’s greetings’ from companies this holiday season.

This subject was discussed on the latest edition of Media Hacks (#22) and the consensus was summed up as “[it's] time to kill these impersonal Holiday Greetings by email.” To underscore that, sometime Media Hacks co-host Chris Brogan’s newsletter mentioned something similar:

“My gosh. Has your inbox suddenly filled up with holiday messages about how thankful companies are that you’re their customer? I’ve received dozens and dozens of messages today alone from a bunch of software that I’d forgotten I’d even installed. Gushy gushy messages with lots of love and cheer.

And yet, it’s all mostly an effort to sell me something. Every one of those holiday wishes offered me a discount on something else. Wow, now there’s the spirit. Let me hook you with something else to buy while I’m thanking you.”

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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.

Quit bugging me

Keeping with the theme of email marketing (see this post about spam from a couple of days ago), this time from the customer’s perspective.

Every year or so I order a few IceBreaker and Bridgedale items from Sierra Trading Post, an outdoor clothing outlet store. Over the course of a year they email me pretty often with details of sales and special ‘we miss you’ discount codes. This is great and I’ll usually order using one of these codes, saving 25% off their already excellent prices. What bugs me is that right after I order I seem to invoke some sort of mailing avalanche. I get an email every one or two days, with another discount code, or a reminder that the discount code they sent me two days ago is about to expire.

I don’t want to unsubscribe from their list because I like receiving the codes, just not right now, plus it seems rude to unsubscribe when they’ve saved me so much over the years.

Meet me half way
What I want is an option that is somewhere between unsubscribing and having to receive then delete/ignore their emails for a while. What if there was an option for “keep me on the list, but don’t send me stuff for a couple of months, unless it’s a really impossible-to-refuse offer”.

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One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch

Email marketing is both one of the most cost effective methods of reaching your customers and the most loathed.

Email marketers have to contend with over zealous junk mail filters, spam crusaders that seek to destroy them and list subscribers who forgot they gave permission. It’s so much easier to ‘report as spam’ than it is to unsubscribe.

I’ve used email marketing myself. I also hate spam. I will only use opt-in lists for this reason. Yet that doesn’t stop recipients of emails I’ve sent replying with torrents of abuse for daring to darken their inbox, and those are the ones I’ve heard from.

Many users will just instruct whatever spam filter they use to block an email. Depending on how that spam filter works, that action gets reported and if enough people do that, the sender of the email gets blacklisted. In the case of an opt-in list this is sailing pretty close to a collective act of defamation.

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