Permission based email vs. spam. A new study find that email marketing can help or hurt greatly.
Email can be a highly effective channel for driving revenues, developing customer relationships and creating brand-experience differentiation. At the same time, however, poor email practices can train customers not only to ignore an offending company in the channel, entailing a high opportunity cost of lost revenues, but nearly half of consumers surveyed reported that they have stopped doing business with companies altogether as a result of poor email practices. Thus, sending "just one more email" is a double-edged sword: it may yield an additional sale, or it might drive a customer away forever.
Having a strong email based relationship with your customers is indisputably one of the very best marketing tools available to you as a business. (And I would argue that it is the
very best tool you have). But in a world where web users have become much more savvy and much more averse to spam - email communication can also be a double edged sword.
Spam is a sticky topic. No one wants to admit they engage in it, particularly to their own customers. Most companies are scared to be accused of it. The real spammers are finding it increasingly difficult to do it. All of us
hate to get it.
And with the flood of fierce opposition to spam both from the spam watchdog community, and from legislatures in the wake of the wildly popular do-not-call list, it has become clear that playing with commercial email, is playing with fire.
So what is the message here for companies who have "legitimately" acquired an email address from a trusting customer?
The real message is this: abuse that trust, and lose a customer forever. You walk a fine line as a business, and if you cross that line, you've lost a customer, and the revenue that customer might have provided down the road. And of course that means revenue from both them, and anyone they may have referred to you.
Customers stop doing business with companies that have poor email practices.
nearly half of consumers surveyed reported that they have stopped doing business with companies altogether as a result of poor email practices.
So if you perturb a customer by spamming them, they are likely to reject you and your brand wholesale.
This makes sense intuitively. Just like
we don't want to waste time sifting through offers for Via*ra, mortgages, debt reduction and Russian brides - our customers don't want to waste time sifting through our spam.
But what about well done email marketing? This may be difficult to define (and if so, drop me a note and let's talk about it), but this study also found this:
Similarly the study finds that over 57% of consumers have made purchases as a result of email.
So engage in email marketing
very, very carefully.
A good rule of thumb for content: Pretend that the email you are sending is actually you, as a salesperson, approaching this customer as they just walked through your door. Would you assault your customer with half-truths, empty promises, a long rolling hyped up sales pitch? Make your email content as respectful as you would be if you were speaking with them face-to-face. Brief too, they didn't come in for a monologue.
A good rule of thumb for frequency: Imagine that you have a customer who
is interested in what your company offers, and has given you permission to give them a call when you think something they might like comes up. How often would you call them? (For most of us, never more than once a week, much more like once a month or less).
Update [11/04/03] : some findings on frequency.
Show your customers the respect they deserve. Yes, the very respect with which you would like to be treated. Be a pioneer in honoring the trust your customers have placed in you. If you do this, sustainable, strong, and enviable business can follow.
The question is this: why do these books have such appeal? The answer isn't rocket science of course, it's because we like to have it spoon fed to us. We don't want to have to work real hard at "getting it." Plus many of us feel we missed the train when it went by, and everyone else hopped on. We want to catch up, and we want to do it fast.
