Why Sacred is as Important as Relevant in Email Marketing

I spent some time this past weekend with Marketing Sherpa’s annual B2B email survey.  Which is either a sad commentary on my free time or a glowing recommendation of Sherpa’s content. Let’s go with the latter.

This excellent survey, once again, highlights the difficulty we face in delivering relevant and meaningful content. We’re getting pretty good at managing lists, sorting out software, tracking open and share and some of us can even trigger an auto-responder with accuracy, but the relevance thing is still a reach and I think there are two not-so-obvious challenges we don’t talk much about in this regard.

One is the sanctity of the Inbox and the other is Bloody Nick (his name is Nick; the descriptor is mine).  We’ll start with Bloody Nick. Nick and I go way back. To about early April, if my records are correct. That’s when Bloody Nick somehow got my email address and began a daily assault on the beachhead of my very last nerve.

Bloody Nick is some sort of (likely self-appointed) speaking guru, and he has decided that I need to learn all he knows. Nick is from the United Kingdom but has decided to spread his light to Canada and wants me to come to his seminar. He really, really, really wants me to come to his seminar. Now I accept that many people in the UK have a lot of trouble imagining how vast the distances are between points in Canada, but that’s why we have Google Maps. So it’s a bit of mystery to me why Bloody Nick thinks I should drop everything and travel to a city five hours away to attend his seminar.  I’m guessing people across Canada got this invitation because Bloody Nick’s email agency couldn’t or wouldn’t do a secondary match to physical addresses. Or maybe they just found the list on a train someplace (that happens in England).  I’m actually more likely to attend one of his U.S. appearances, but let’s not tell Nick that.

Bloody Nick promises to make me ridiculously good at public speaking. Ridiculously! Can’t wait. He also promises to send a free copy of his book to all the people who will send him an email in response to his apology for spelling Ottawa incorrectly. Mostly what Bloody Nick does is fill my inbox, waste my time and piss me off. After the third week of daily NickNotes, I finally banished him to the junk list, not because he was irrelevant (I do a lot of speaking so more information is good), but because he violated the sacred space that is my Inbox.

And this is where I think we still have a problem with email marketing that we don’t have with physical direct. I don’t know a lot of marketers who aren’t inundated with flyers, postcards, letters and other paper-based rubbish on a daily basis. And most of us give it a glance and launch it to the recycling bin without much malice toward the sender. I hang on to the stuff that’s brilliant and the stuff that’s beyond stupid and most of everything else is either delegated or tossed.

But email is different. It lands on the same desk, sort of, but it’s all mucked up in the real stuff. I don’t get a lot of “real” physical mail anymore. Other than periodicals, most of my mail is direct marketing. But my email is full of things that are important like invoices and helpful suggestions from my boss. Marketing messages interrupt me while I’m trying to do my job. They are distracting, and the last thing I need is something else to take my mind off my job.

I have this sense that they are violating not just a sacred place where real work gets done, but a sacred slice of time as well. I haven’t seen any research about the best times of day to send email, but I would have to guess that overnight would be ideal. It certainly is for me because I spend the first bit of my day clearing out the junk and doing a bit of triage on what’s left. I’m open, at that point, to new things from people I don’t know because it’s not distracting.

An hour later, I’m deep in the muck of the day so new messages are more than just a matter of passing interest; they are either relevant or they are distracting. And nothing else. If they are distracting, they are either saved for later or, in the case of anyone I don’t know or don’t trust, they are nuked. Nick, that’s you dear.

I’m guessing that I’m not unique in this and I suggest that we need to spend some time working out how to deliver content that is not only relevant but also how to deliver it in a way that is respectful of the sacred time and space around the Inbox.

Bloody Nick didn’t understand this. If you are interested in becoming a ridiculously good speaker, here is Bloody Nick’s website.

Bizmarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
escwilliams@gmail.com
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