Bacn is good for email marketing

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on August 28, 2007

pig illustrating bacn conceptReturned to work to discover various media outlets and blogs talking about Bacn. Defined broadly as email you requested but don't necessarily want to read immediately.

Bacn sits somewhere in the middle between spam and personal email. More legitimate than the former, less interesting than the latter. And thus covers much of what we think of as legitimate commercial email: account notifications, email alerts, e-newsletters...

Others argue about the need for such a term, the motivation behind its use or the ridiculousness of another bit of jargon. But I'd like to take another angle.

The term originated outside the marketing community...among email users. Marketers have long despaired that exactly these users fail to grasp the differences between legitimate commercial email and spam. (Not that the differences are always obvious.)

But the user-created term Bacn is open acknowledgment of exactly that difference. As such, I hope it catches on.

Having your emails described as Bacn is not ideal, since the definition isn't exactly gushing about the email's value. But it's a whole heap better than being treated like spam.

Thoughts?

More offbeat and humor | Tags: , ,

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | 5 comment(s) - add yours!
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | as a biweekly newsletter
Sign-up for the Email Marketing Reports NEWSLETTER
Twice a month, free, packed with email marketing advice and all the posts from this blog.
Email:      First Name:     
    More info and sample

5 Comments:

I think bacn adds yet another challenge and opportunity for email marketers to fight through the spam clutter (and now bacn) to make sure their email matters.

Hopefully, a good newsletter or promotional mailing rises to the top of the inbox and gets read but I would interested in seeing metrics on the bacn effect - essentially, impacting open/click rates beyond the normal 7-10 business day window.
By Blogger Simms Jenkins, Principal - BrightWave Marketing, on 28 August, 2007  
 

Thanks Simms. So maybe social networks are hurting email, because of all the additional email fluff they generate...! Complicated world.
By Blogger Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on 28 August, 2007  
 

Hi Mark,

I agree that this type of messaging presents a challenge and an opportunity, although part of me thinks we're simply giving a name to something that has been around (and that email marketers should have been paying attention to) for longer than the past week.

I see bacn as something to keep in mind particularly when creating/revising transactional messages.

Most transactional emails make no attempt to get your attention. They expect that their mere presence in your inbox will get them read - assuming the sender cares if you read them at all.

For me, bacn underscores the importance of making your transactional messages (or at least certain ones) relevant/useful/attention-grabbing. That way, even if subscribers don't read right away, they remember the message and read later.

Not sure if you've come across their messages before but ING does a good job of this when sending out statements to depositors - their message subject/body is mostly consistent but they also tack on other useful information in the message and reference it in the subject (they even included a "Happy Birthday" message within my December statement notification!).

(Sorry if I ran a tad long.)
By Anonymous Justin Premick, on 28 August, 2007  
 

Thanks Justin...hmmm...so the publicity around the new jargon might send transactional email through the same development pattern that traditional marketing email went through?

Initially, everyone read your newsletter or promotion. Then came spam, and marketers realized you had to work harder to get attention.

Transactional email is still pitched as pulling very high opens. But if there's much more transactional email around, then (again) senders of those emails have to work harder to make theirs stand out.
By Blogger Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on 29 August, 2007  
 

Exactly (and much more concisely put).

As Facebook opens up to send/receive mail with outside addresses (in some cases sending notifications to users instead of the full email) and more people use that, Twitter, MySpace (who may follow Facebook's lead on opening up their email platform) or other such tools, the volume of transactional (and transactional-looking) emails spikes and we can end up with the exact situation you describe.

So that's the challenge: take your would-be bacn and make it stand out.
By Anonymous Justin Premick, on 29 August, 2007  
 

Post a Comment