Email; The Lazy Person's Digital Marketing Tactic

Think back to your early days of dating. You meet a great person and they happily provide their contact information in hopes of getting together soon. After you get home you call them. Then call again the next day. And the day after. And the day after. Wait, you shouldn’t do that! So why do so many companies think this is ok when we provide our contact information to them?

Email Marketing Is Great

Let us start with the good. There are few mediums out there where you have the ability to easily craft a specific message for a specific customer. Yes, display, text, social, and direct mail all have these capabilities, but email makes targeting easy. If you have obtained an email address it is typically because someone has given consent for you to contact them. Through tools such as MailChimp, Marketo, Constant Contact and others you can have emails sent automatically that are dynamically created to fit these customer’s specific needs. So the contact gave you consent and then you followed that by creating an email that matched their needs, reaching their direct inbox in seconds. Now that is powerful!

Stop Being Lazy Email Marketers!

Just this morning I received three emails from various arms of an organization I am intimately involved with. Yesterday I received just as many. None are connected. None speak to my specific interests of the organization. None get me excited about the brand. But I should not pick on a single brand. Recently I purchased furniture from a large online retailer. Since that purchase I have gone back to view other items that I may wish to purchase. As I browse the emails cometh at a rate of at least two per day. Again, no connection to me nor my browsing behavior other than simply reminding me that I browsed a product or category.

It’s Time To Do Better

Here are some keys to being a responsible email marketing guru;

Stop sending multiple emails per day; Send one that is a collection of the customer’s interests (and maybe only send 2-3 per week)
Make a connection; Put on your public relations hat and spark some emotion
Use retargeting less creepily; leverage other tactics to hammer the brand home, just don’t think that email is the only tool you have

Treat your email contact list just like that first phone number you received. You want to show you’re interested without being pushy. You want to remind them without smothering them. Be protective of your lists and remember that they receive tons of messages from others every day. In order to stand out be the one that communicates better than the rest!