There was a time when I was, indisputably, the most feared pitcher in my small town Little League—for all the wrong reasons. Let’s just say that if you were within three feet of home plate, you had best be wearing a helmet, or you might soon be wearing a fastball. It got to the point that umpires asked my coach not to let me pitch, because my taking the bump meant a long afternoon of hit batsmen and/or walking the bases loaded each inning.
But it wasn’t always like that. Early in my Little League career I was a fine pitcher, but one season I got a new coach who decided that I should change my grip on the ball. Being so young, I didn’t know that the grip my coach insisted I start using was a curveball grip. Suffice to say, not everybody can control a curveball.
My being forced to throw wild curveballs is very similar to the situation faced by email marketers who must contend with “coaches” who don’t realize the damage they are causing. It’s a tough situation to be in; defy the authority of someone who could bench/fire you, or follow orders and hope for the best. Marketers are being told to send more often. Marketers are being told to find more people to send email to, permission-based or not. In a survey SubscriberMail conducted earlier in 2009, one reason cited by marketers who were not conducting adequate testing of their messages was “a C-level aversion to testing.” If that isn’t bad coaching, I don’t know what is.
Occasionally I’ll come across an article in my RSS feed or a post to Twitter that says something to the effect of “Email marketing study finds that relevance is key.” My initial reaction is usually to chuckle and think of similar headlines, such as “Drivers report difficulty when blindfolded,” but even though the importance of relevance in email marketing would seem to go without saying, it’s something that can easily be lost when a misguided mindset of “more more more” controls the strategy of an email marketing program.
For a pitcher in baseball, the ability to throw 100 miles per hour doesn’t mean a thing if the ball isn’t anywhere near the plate. The story is much the same in email marketing; the power is only effective if you can control it.
Earlier this year, SubscriberMail engaged a vendor to assist with an online advertising initiative. Just a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from this vendor that—despite containing elements of personalization, such as my name and company name—amounted to little more than a “canned” message that may as well have been aimed at a total stranger.
Even worse than the “infomercial” style of writing used in the message was the fact that it’s From address was that of a representative I had spent quite a bit of time working with before, both via email and over the phone. Having already established this relationship months before, I was a bit insulted to be given such a generic sales pitch—as if I had never heard of or been in contact with the vendor in question.
A week or so later, this same representative sent me a follow-up email that, while still a bit generic, seemed as though it was actually written to me. So I wrote back and we had a normal email exchange over the next couple of days.
The moral of this story is pretty simple: don’t treat email recipients as if they are all the same. The original message I received was sent through an email service provider (indicated by the ESP logo in the footer), so it’s safe to assume that at least basic segmentation tools were at this sender’s disposal. How then, could a completely generic sales pitch end up in the inbox of one of their former clients (i.e. me)?
There is a reason the second message prompted me to take action, while the first message left me cold. While elements of personalization—such as addressing recipients by name—are a nice touch, they can’t make the heart of the message itself any more relevant when it is way off the mark. Combining personalization with segmentation gives your message a much better chance of achieving the level of relevancy it needs. At the very least, some basic list segmentation—separating clients, former clients, prospects, etc. into their own lists—could have prevented this type of irrelevant communication now and in the future.
It can be easy to overlook the basics sometimes, but it’s also easy to see why it’s never a good idea.
Selling a wide variety of products is good for business, but makes email marketing relevancy difficult. See how the folks at Sam’s Club put the power of preference in their subscribers’ hands.
There was a time when I was, indisputably, the most feared pitcher in my small town Little League—for all the wrong reasons. Let’s just say that if you were within three feet of home plate, you had best be wearing a helmet, or you might soon be wearing a fastball. It got to the point that umpires asked my coach not to let me pitch, because my taking the bump meant a long afternoon of hit batsmen and/or walking the bases loaded each inning.
Earlier this year, 
