Email marketing is not like pig farming

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on March 20, 2007

Ever been on a modern, industrialized pig farm? The animals are merely an economic expression. Each group of growing pigs is characterized by a series of numbers: feed conversion, daily weight gain, mortality, veterinary costs etc.

The welfare of these pigs took a nosedive as animal husbandry became livestock management became a manufacturing business. The pigs turned from animals into numbers.

Your email list holds similar dangers. We are obsessed with metrics and management issues like anti-spam laws or deliverability problems. We forget that an address is not a series of characters and numbers, but an individual reading your emails.

Faced with the disinterest of his or her custodian, the average pig has few options other than to go slowly mad. Email addresses, on the other hand, can rebel through their delete, unsubscribe and spam buttons.

Forgetting their welfare is not an option.

Fortunately, unlike pig farming, keeping subscribers happy usually means better results anyway. But we do need constant reminders that we have a fickle and human audience. Fail to deliver value to that audience and they leave for fresh pastures.

So step away from the spreadsheet and take a look at your emails from the perspective of those on the receiving end. These articles will help:

Marketing with an email newsletter: value
What does the reader care about?
Are you spamming your customers?

More on email strategy | Tags: email marketing, spam, relevancy, email list management

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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