The email that cried wolf, deliverability and the unemotionally subscribed

A good post over at AWeber on urgency in subject lines set off a train of thought on expectations, engagement and the future of email marketing. (This is why I have few friends.)

Consider these email subject lines from one online services company:

Urgency works best when it’s…um…genuinely urgent

They clearly use urgency as a means of driving action. And I’m sure it works in terms of immediate sales and without requiring too much investment. (Which are two of email marketing’s biggest advantages.)

But there’s lots more potentially going on here.

First, it’s easy to forget that the recipient’s response depends not only on the current message but on all the messages that they received in the past.

I suspect newcomers to this list are much more likely to respond to urgency.

Why?

Because long-timers are conditioned to understand that you can easily ignore the discount deadline: the next one will be along in a few days time.

That long-term effect has two other potential downsides.

First, if you teach me to distrust your subject lines, how does that impact my broader trust in your company?

Second, if they really do have a one-time-only sale, I’m not going to take it seriously.

The E word again

Another potential negative is the engagement one. We learned last year that ISPs are beginning to look at how people interact with your emails when deciding if they’re worth delivering to the inbox.

A long stream of boilerplate “don’t miss out” emails that carry no credibility in terms of urgency surely conditions a significant proportion of a list to more or less ignore the messages?

Few opens or clicks and a lot of automatic deletes hurts those metrics that might be crucial to inbox delivery in the future.

But wait. Let’s rewind…

Targeting the unemotionally subscribed

A long stream of “don’t miss out” emails that carry no credibility in terms of urgency conditions people to more or less ignore the messages, unless they happen to be in the market for the product or service offered right now.

This approach is almost custom built to exploit the unemotionally subscribed, a term coined by Dela Quist.

These are inactive subscribers who are ignoring your emails for the moment, but still want to get them because they are a reminder. Dela expands on the concept here.

I buy online services of the type sold by the sender maybe twice a year. So I stay subscribed to an email I never look at because when I am ready to buy, I can find a nice coupon code or appropriate link and head over for my well-earned discount.

(Side note: given those subject lines, I am never going to pay full price from that company ever again.)

So now we have a “successful” and “wanted” email program that doesn’t engage. But we need engagement to keep the ISPs happy.

Engagement isn’t (just) about deliverability

So should we change a winning formula? I think so, but not because of the ISPs…

Should we be satisfied with just providing a reminder service and keeping ROI up with a small conversion percentage?

Shouldn’t we want more from our emails: all those ancillary benefits we praise, but rarely consider (or measure).

Are we saying that until we started worrying about ISPs measuring user interaction with emails, we weren’t concerned about engaging our subscribers?

Are we not guilty (not for the first time) of designing emails for deliverability and not for long-term business value?

If we design campaigns to encourage engagement so we don’t get blocked by ISPs, aren’t we going about it the wrong way?

Shouldn’t we be designing campaigns that engage recipients because engaged recipients are good for business?

Who is your real audience?

If the focus is on engagement solely for the sake of deliverability, we’ll likely get it wrong.

Why?

Because we can’t second guess the weight ISPs give to different measures of engagement (is a click worth 10 opens? Does getting added to an address list make up for 1000 unopened emails?).

But also because we’ll start forcing opens and clicks for their own sake and not because these clicks deliver meaningful value to either us or our recipients.

We might chase ourselves into the inbox, but will we also chase recipients away from our brand?

More thought is required.

If we want engagement, then engagement in a way that delivers value. Let me quote Dylan Boyd:

“Think about how you engage, entertain, interact, reward, celebrate and connect with your audience and customers. The basics of marketing are still the fundamentals that you should be following, storytelling and building long term emotionally connected relationships will continue to win again and again.”

Obviously we have to adjust email approaches to factors like ISP deliverability requirements. And innocent little techniques to get extra clicks won’t do any harm and have many benefits.

But we should not lose sight of the fact that the people we really need to keep happy are the subscribers.

And, intuitively, I suspect anything that keeps them happy will also keep ISPs and others in the delivery chain happy, too. No second guessing required.

So a challenge for 2010 is indeed engagement…to get past the “immediate sales and we’ll worry about the rest later” mentality. But for the right reasons. Agree?

[And just to close the loop, the sender highlighted earlier also sends out a content-based newsletter so people probably are "engaging" with their emails after all. It has poor subject lines, mind, but that's a story for another day...]

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