Email marketing: the worst that can happen

A problem for email marketing is what I call the "worst that can happen" fallacy.

Email marketers often complain that their colleagues or superiors want them to do unhealthy things with their list, to squeeze yet more dollars, downloads, pageviews, or whatever out of subscribers.

Examples might be sending more and more email with the same old tired offers. Or sending email to a "borrowed" list of attendees at a trade show.

Newcomers to email marketing often make the same mistakes.

A key reason is that the perceived cost of doing anything with email marketing is low. Not the low cost of sending emails, but the perceived low cost of doing it badly.

After all, what's the worst that can happen?

If you keep on mailing mundane offers ever more often or hit up a list with no explicit permission to do so...what's the potential downside?

Maybe you lose the few dollars it cost to send the emails? Perhaps get a few more unsubscribes? A few grumbles from customers? Hey, we can live with that!

So keep bumping up frequency until the net profit curve finally starts to dip. Then we'll stop.

But this is where email marketing differs from just about every other form of marketing out there.

Profit curves in email marketing don't dip gradually when you get it wrong. They plummet.

The worst that can happen is a lot worse than most newcomers and those used to other marketing environments imagine.

And that's what you need to communicate to those people putting you under pressure to squeeze every last drop of revenue blood from your list. Here's what you can show them...

My home is my inbox

The inbox is not like a TV set or car radio or magazine or billboard or website or even your mailbox. It is a private place. We care what goes in there.

Way back in 1999, Nick Usborne wrote:

"This connection and intimacy we have with our mail is why internet marketers love email. It gets right to the heart of us, in our homes and at work."

"When you arrive in someone's mail you arrive in their personal space. Respect that or pay the price."

People skip over boring magazine ads, ignore shoddy TV spots, tune out poor radio spots, overlook irrelevant banners.

And that's largely it.

But people don't just ignore or delete "bad" emails. They resent them. A brand pays a price for not delivering value-by-email and annoying the subscriber.

Customers really are in control

This cost to the brand goes beyond some vague emotional dislike. (Which, incidentally, can be very strong: ask anyone what they think of spam.)

When you see an irrelevant magazine ad, you don't ring up the publishers and complain. Email subscribers do.

Survey after survey shows that subscribers will report email as spam if they are unwanted, come too often, are not relevant enough or come unsolicited.

Does this matter?

Yes. Spam complaints are a major factor in determining the reputation of the sender. The more complaints you get, the worse your reputation, the less likely you are to get delivered.

Return Path has a nice graph showing the strong correlation between complaint levels and delivery rates.

All the major email address providers factor complaint levels into their evaluation of incoming email. If you get a lot of complaints, your emails are blocked or diverted to junk folders.

AOL, for example, notes publicly that improving your reputation improves inbox deliverability and that this reputation...

"...takes into account a wide variety of factors including -- but not limited to -- spam complaints..."

And Yahoo states:

"Consumer reports of spam negatively impact an address's reputation data."

Nor is it just a percentages game. Too many complaints can see you added to blacklists (leading to catastrophic delivery problems), and ineligible for whitelist and certification programs.

Laura Atkins summarizes the issue nicely:

"This ability to provide feedback means that annoying 100 people in order to make 1 sale is no longer an effective marketing approach and, more often than not, results in blockage by an ISP."

And here's a real world example reported by Michelle Eichner:

"In the case of this mailer, their older, inactive users were complaining which caused all emails to be blocked by Comcast. Emailing "less" was the difference between $0 and generating a return on investment from their Comcast subscribers."

If you can't get your colleagues to grasp the nuances of all that, explain it like this:

Imagine TiVo sent a daily list to the TV networks, noting which advertiser's spots were skipped over most. And then the TV networks just showed a blank screen when a new ad from that advertiser was broadcast.

That's pretty much how email works.

Related posts:
Email frequency: can you increase it safely
The hidden costs of "lazy" email practices

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