Nowadays, it is pretty impossible to avoid receiving blast emails in your e-mailbox. Upon reading Marketo's ebook Conversations And Not Campaigns, it made me want to check my emails and see what I can find.
Before I even start sharing my thoughts about blast emails themselves, I would like to say a big "thank you" to Gmail for sorting my emails automatically into different categories. Oh how that helps me to read MY emails! I’m glad I finally get to say this delayed thank you. Although not many email providers have adopted this method, I do think it is going to be an inevitable trend for a better (or what is supposed to be “normal”) user experience. However, it does post some challenges to blast emails and businesses that market through them. How can they still keep their audience and conversions?
I definitely agree that blast emails should be more conversation oriented. It is simply hard to be motivated to click through something that does not even attract me.
Promotional blast emails take up the most of the blast emails I receive. From a marketer’s point of view, it is definitely worth the effort to keep potential customers posted about what’s going on and especially the sales. But from an email user’s point of view, I might not even click open the email if the subject line does not interest me. A brief look at the list of promotional emails I received last week, I am trying to figure out how it worked for my brain to decide which ones to look at and which ones to ignore. First, I look at the sender name and look for brands that I find interesting. In this round, any brand/sender that is irrelevant to my interest is left out. Second, if a sender interests me, I look at the subject of the email. “20% Off...” - nah, not interested. “Shop Home, Fashion, Apparel & More...” - what are you trying to sell? “Gillette Mach3 Refill Blades...” - hmmm, not a guy, don’t need them. “10 restaurant winners...” - well I’m not going to travel a thousand miles to go to one restaurant listed there... So I ended up not even opening most of those promotional blast emails from brands that actually interested me. I did get interested by “Take $10 off $50. Christian Dior Makeup Palette $55.95, Guess Fashion Sunglasses $29.9...” and clicked on it to see what’s going on in this offer. It is pretty clear what I’m going to get and how much they cost, and that helps me personally to figure out if I want to click through the links embedded in this email to check out the products and the entire website of the brand. Personally, I would rather see the price directly than see a vague whatever “percent off”. My conclusion is, if the email happens to have a subject line with products and price that interests me, I’ll click it. That is my personal preference - I’m wondering if email marketers can collect user preference data like this and use them more effectively by sending emails accordingly? To those who like percentage, send them percentage subjected emails, to those who like coupons, send them coupon subjected ones, and to those who likes to be addressed personally, send them greetings and wishes...
Apart from promotional blast emails, there are also social blast emails that we get quite often now. To be frank, I don’t like the LinkedIn blast emails for groups. The way they are put together is far from intelligent and does not seem to be well designed at all. Their contents are not efficiently organized. For one of those rare updates that actually included a video, it showed up at the bottom of the whole long list - what is the chance of everyone scrolling all the way down there to discover that when they are bored out by the plain bland heavy endless texts ahead of it? It makes me wonder why LinkedIn, as a leader in social media, allows this to happen. Anyway, apart from problems with bigger social outlets like LinkedIn, we often subscribe to updates or e-newsletters from organizations and businesses that are of interest to us. Quite some of these e-news do not actually take advantage of the opportunity to drive traffic back to their main sites and generate more interactions on their own more dynamic platforms. I do like to be able to get the information I need in the email I receive, but I also would like to see extra links that lead me to more relevant content when wanted as extra choices. Last but not least, the worst thing that happens is when I click on a link and it leads to a page not found. I always wonder if those senders actually care to read their own stuff...
It is probably the hardest thing to cater to everyone when you have thousands of subscribers. I’ll keep my mind and eyes open for some more insights from professional experts as well as new research/analyst methods.
Image sources:
Screen Cut of Gmail: mail.google.com
Bone comics: http://necrobones.com/comics/
404: http://en.balticmedia.com/404-EN/
It is probably the hardest thing to cater to everyone when you have thousands of subscribers. I’ll keep my mind and eyes open for some more insights from professional experts as well as new research/analyst methods.
Image sources:
Screen Cut of Gmail: mail.google.com
Bone comics: http://necrobones.com/comics/
404: http://en.balticmedia.com/404-EN/