“Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam!”
This is not your father’s spam. Oh, back in the day, identifying spam was easy, it meant filtering through various inbox offers of “get rich quick” or “saving a peruvian prince” or “deposit these funds and send me a check”.
Today, however, its not so easy. Spam has taken on a whole new dimension, “opt-in spam”. Simply put, its brands abusing their power.
I belong to a number of retail mailing lists, some are for personal interest, and others are to see what the “Big Boys” are doing. After months of receiving the usual email once-a-week, I have been forced to unsubscribe from a large national home furnishings retailer’s list.
Why? Because initially I was receiving one email per week – a generally friendly relationship – even though I began to wonder how often I really needed to purchase a hand-made distressed office lamp anyway, I kept up my end of the relationship and opened the emails.
Within a few months though, the once-a-week offer turned into 5 times a month, then it quickly escalated to twice a week (e-stalker anyone). Twice a week I am now being asked if I am interested in a coffee brown sofa to go with the hand-made distressed office lamp.
No! No Thank You!
The problem wasn’t just the volume, I receive plenty of emails from other lists to which I subscribe. The problem was that they didn’t have anything new to say, just new items to sell (or combinations of old items). There was no new content, nothing to keep me reading, nothing to keep me interested, and most importantly, no value proposition in exchange for my time and limited space in my inbox.
So… I unsubscribed. I had stopped reading the emails months prior, stopped opening them weeks prior, it became too painful to watch, and too annoying to read.
What could they have done differently? Pull up a hand-riveted leather side chair and I’ll go through a few of my initial suggestions:
1. Decrease the frequency – Doing so would have still kept them top of my mind, but would not have rendered the communications mundane and irrelevant.
2. Add seasonally relative content – Give me a reason to read through the email. Guide me to your products through engaging content, not just photos and captions.
3. Add digital couponing to your digital initiatives – While not all retailers will be successful with couponing, it is a method to keep subscribers… subscribed.
4. Create engaging subject lines – Before you can read the email you have to open it, and unless the subject line is varying and engaging, items #2 & #3 above will have no impact.
These are just a few of my thoughts… now back to thumbing through the fall catalog, I’m really in need a hand-made distressed office lamp.
————————————————-
Matthew Kapusta is an experienced Digital Strategist and online marketer, he creates multi-channel digital strategies and tactical execution plans that produce measurable results and maintain a favorable ROI across multiple channels.
