November 4, 2008
The Relentless Email Pursuit of Shoppers
Some consumers
may be beginning to rethink their decision to opt-in to various email lists
from online merchants as e-tailers are increasing the frequency and forwardness
of communications in an effort to spur people to buy.
According
to an Associated Press report, retailers are imbuing a sense of
urgency with their emails including subject lines such as “Last chance to save 20 percent,” or
“Hurry, final sale ends.”
Cory Porter, an online
shopping regular living in Washington, D.C., said the number of emails
he has received has almost doubled in the past
couple of months and most of them are not relevant to his needs. “I
find them annoying,” he said. “I am a 32-year-old guy who lives
in an urban area with no kids. In other words, I don’t need blouses, high
heels, or kid’s juice boxes.”
E-tailing analysts said
that while online will continue to outperform stores in terms of year-over-year
percentage growth, there is no doubt that the economic factors that have
hurt brick and mortar operations are also being felt in the virtual world.
The
relative low-cost and speedy turnaround of sending out email blasts are
among the benefits that make e-tailers turn to this tactic when sales activity
begins to slow. There are also the returns. According to the Direct Marketers
Association, marketers bring in an average of $45.06 in return for every
dollar spent on an email campaign compared to $7.28 for catalogs
and $15.55 for direct mail.
A
study by Internet Retailer found that among 174 online merchants,
nearly half have increased the number of emails sent out this year versus
last. Forrester Research predicts that emails will grow from 158 billion
in 2008 to 258 billion, a 63 percent increase, by 2013.
Consumers,
however, are getting to the point where they are now beginning to push
back and say enough is enough.
Michael
Wagner, CEO of etoys.com, said his company drives about 12 percent of its
revenues with e-blasts while adding, “We are concerned about exhausting
the customer.”
The
biggest issue for many consumers is the lack of relevancy in email messages
from online retailers. Stephanie Miller, vice president of market development
for Return Path Inc., told the AP that less than 20 percent of e-mails
from retailers are customized for the consumer receiving them.
Discussion Questions:
Has the number of email messages sent by online merchants
become too great or is the real problem in the messages?
How do e-tailers overcome the traps?
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Poll
Effective retail emails are personalized, contain information relevant to each consumer and contain a strong motivational offer. Too often, emails don’t meet these criteria. When this happens, consumers opt out.
Why would any retailer want to have a consumer purposely leave the store? It’s not difficult to make email meaningful.
One size doesn’t fit all. Retailers need to make their email messages more relevant to the customer. And that could be the result if more retailers asked for a little more information from the customer upfront (subject to a strict privacy policy of course.) That way, the likelihood of a single male getting an email notice for sales on blouses or kid’s juice boxes would be very small.
More retailers should send emails based on customer purchases. Apple’s “genius” music list on iTunes gives consumers ideas of similar music they might like based on their current favorites. This promotes sales and future purchases, but is more relevant to individual consumers.
The secret to effective email marketing is to focus on the needs of the customer. Serve their needs by providing only relevant and motivating content and they’ll be thrilled with your emails.
The problem that we’re seeing is that as retailers get more desperate, they are focusing more on their own need for increased sales. When the goal of email is simply to drive sales through mass communication, it will only discourage customers from participating.
Look at what kills most email campaigns. It’s not costs, it’s lack of customer involvement. After the initial enrollment, if customers don’t find value in the emails, they lose interest and stop viewing them or unsubscribe from the program. Retailers need to focus on delivering genuine value in the emails and maintain the relationship with their customers. Don’t try to get them to buy something they don’t want, help them save money on something they already want or need. Efforts to change customer behavior or drive impulse purchases for the benefit of the retailer will only kill the long-term potential of email programs.
To me, emailing customers with deep discounts and promotions with a desperate tone is a horrible practice–especially in a harsh economy. What is really required is for retailers to start delivering on the promise of targeted email marketing (driving toward the “promised land” of true one-to-one marketing). The more that retailers know about their customer (intelligence gathered through customer experience/satisfaction surveys and behavioral and attitudinal studies), the better able they’ll be to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Without that customer information, retailers are merely taking a “one message fits all” approach which will, as this article points out, fail.
Retailers that want to capitalize on the promise of email marketing must embrace the idea of it being a part of a holistic customer experience management program–one that leverages customer information and intelligence as opposed to treating email marketing as an island unto itself. “Blasting” email offers and deep discounts to a customer database results in cannibalizing the brand; personalizing offers and providing meaningful discounts that drive more frequent and larger purchases builds sales and the brand.
There are some email retailers like hocks.com, that maybe twice a year sends out an email. There are others like drugstore.com that send emails at least twice a week. And yet there are others like bargainoutfitters.com that send emails almost daily or at least every other day.
So when is “enough is enough”? I think some email recipients can only tolerate so many emails in a given week. I realize and already see that some of these e-retailers are starting to crank up the volume and frequency, even though we are still several weeks away from Black Monday.
Like the election campaign, this too will be over, but not soon enough for some of us.
I sign up for email alerts from plenty of merchants, simply so I can monitor how they’re marketing to consumers. And, yes, the email has been increasing. While it doesn’t annoy me, I can imagine the average shopper is likely to be near the breaking point. And that’s just what merchants don’t need now–to turn off the consumers they’re trying to reach.
More relevant email is a must. Consumers want to know that merchants understand their lifestyles, needs and product desires. Across their lifestyles, consumers view themselves as unique individuals, and custom email is one way to begin to treat them as such. The generic scattershot approach doesn’t even begin to get near that.
Amen to all of you. I maintain a junk email box that I use ONLY for online commerce, because I know that I’ll be spammed constantly. I don’t want to call out these companies because I work with them!…but spammers, you know who you are.
The holy grail for customers will be to opt IN to messages about things they care about. Imagine if The Home Depot allowed customers who were about to remodel a kitchen the ability to get information on appliances and cabinets, then opt out after the kitchen was finished? What about offering special-size customers the ability to get information about sales of apparel that fits them? What about allowing customers to self-identify themselves as moms of toddlers, or vegetarians, or golf nuts? Shoppers would respond, and retailers would have actionable information….
I have been involved in email marketing for 8 years, primarily in the E-grocery space, but in B2B as well.
Grocery is a tough market, as the consumer usually has little patience and isn’t interested in bells, whistles and entertainment. From that perspective, grocery and other FMCG might be a tad different than shoes or electronics or books. Consumers in grocery are quick to opt out if the program doesn’t adhere to or pay close attention to the three key attributes that consumers are looking for in this space.
I was recently talking to a fair sized company specializing in delivering targeted promotions to customers based on their grocery loyalty data. They have tried email but shifted to direct mail when their emails triggered a 2-3% “open” rate. My experience in both the e-grocery arena (MyWebGrocer) and in my B2B arenas (Panther Mountain, ShelfSnap) yield open rates of >25%.
The three key attributes?
CONTROL: I saw an interesting talk the other day about the ME consumer 2.0. More responsible than the ME 1.0 model, but very much a consumer who wants to be in control of their environment as much as possible (can you say Shopper Marketing?). So any effective email program allows the consumer to select AND change frequency, interests and method of delivery (phone, email etc.)
CONVENIENCE: This means the consumer’s view, not ours. Generally in grocery it means getting information about what they want, when they want it FAST, without a lot of hype and fancy pictures they have to wade through. Finally;
RELEVANCE: Of course. And keep the cross-sell or competitive sell to a minimum, if you don’t want to drive them into hiding.
Great subject!
Um, yes.
Permission to email is not permission to email twice a day.
Ideally, we would email customers when we have their favorite merchandise on sale, or if they’ve asked us for something that’s relatively hard to find–and we have it for them, and, better yet, we can offer it at a discount.
Also, I’ve developed a pet peeve in search results, but it should go double for email: The link should go directly to the item. Not the page where the thing is somewhere buried in the text, or where it might be halfway down the second fold, but right at the item I’m interested in.
In an email, I realize we’d like the recipient to come shop a while, but how bout just having a BUY NOW button that puts the thing right in the cart? Wouldn’t we like to make the sale instantly and monetize that campaign? Then let’s do a Keep Shopping button from the cart page. Online shopping is supposed to save me time and get me what I really want, really fast. Then we can add value after that. For now, let’s take the money and run.
Hopefully companies will monitor the number of people opting out of their emails and keep track of the timing of these decisions. What they will find it that too many irrelevant emails are not welcome. If email allows for direct, targeted communication, messages that are not relevant are offensive.
My experience has been that successful retailers are looking at the quality of the mailing list rather than quantity. It should not be treated as a numbers game.
Online retailers, instead of just investing in volume of e-mails, shoud consider investing in software that allows the messages of the e-mail to be more behaviorally relevant. I have opted out of about 10 already, and my favorite shoe store DSW is reaching the tipping point already.
I would gladly give my favorite online retailers a little more information about my preferences if they could accomodate more sophisticated targeting.
Max is correct…effective e-mail communication to consumers should trigger action, either through online shopping or by prompting a trip to the bricks-and-mortar store. Otherwise, too much communication becomes merely an annoyance and just a bunch of “noise” along with everyone else’s e-mails. Granted, consumers have the ability to opt out, but those who opted in to begin with should be considered among the most engaged potential customers. It’s important to treat them accordingly.
Email, in many ways, is no different than any other communication. If all you can do is scream an extra 10% off this weekend only, no wonder people are not opening and in fact opting out at greater rates. The smart retailers give out information with an, “oh, by the way here’s a deal.” But then, I’m probably preaching to the choir here….
Like everything else, this comes down to the consumer’s relationship with the brand. No relationship and too many emails = annoying. Great relationship and emails with valuable communications = welcomed and helpful. The challenge is to create the latter, where it feels like a message from a friend rather then a cheap sales pitch.
If the government treated email marketers like they do telemarketers they would all be in jail by now.
These companies should be embarrassed to call themselves marketers. They are anything but. How is being abusive to your better customers considered a good idea? Who within these marketing departments is actually saying, “why yes, let’s send another million emails to the same million people we emailed yesterday with the exact same offer.” Yeah…brilliant. Retailers that have an average frequency of 3x per year are sending out emails daily, even if you’ve been there in the past week.
Everyone I’ve talked to is opting out of email as quickly as they come, some even looking forward to getting them so they can rid them out of their lives–forever.
Free emails do not equate to free marketing. Such a shame that these retailers have invested millions of dollars over many years to build a loyal customer database, only to have some hack email manager kill the goose that laid the golden egg. That is a hefty price to pay for free email.
More Discussions
As Boomers ‘Age Out of Peak Purchasing,’ How Can National Brands Retain Interest With Gen Z?
According to a recent First Insight study titled “Is Gen Z Still Choosing Your Brand,” while…Is Supply Chain Volatility Here To Stay?
Can we expect an ongoing volatility to remain in terms of retail supply chain?Has Same-Day Delivery Become an Expectation Across Retail?
Are expectations around retail delivery speed in flux?
Effective retail emails are personalized, contain information relevant to each consumer and contain a strong motivational offer. Too often, emails don’t meet these criteria. When this happens, consumers opt out.
Why would any retailer want to have a consumer purposely leave the store? It’s not difficult to make email meaningful.
One size doesn’t fit all. Retailers need to make their email messages more relevant to the customer. And that could be the result if more retailers asked for a little more information from the customer upfront (subject to a strict privacy policy of course.) That way, the likelihood of a single male getting an email notice for sales on blouses or kid’s juice boxes would be very small.
More retailers should send emails based on customer purchases. Apple’s “genius” music list on iTunes gives consumers ideas of similar music they might like based on their current favorites. This promotes sales and future purchases, but is more relevant to individual consumers.
The secret to effective email marketing is to focus on the needs of the customer. Serve their needs by providing only relevant and motivating content and they’ll be thrilled with your emails.
The problem that we’re seeing is that as retailers get more desperate, they are focusing more on their own need for increased sales. When the goal of email is simply to drive sales through mass communication, it will only discourage customers from participating.
Look at what kills most email campaigns. It’s not costs, it’s lack of customer involvement. After the initial enrollment, if customers don’t find value in the emails, they lose interest and stop viewing them or unsubscribe from the program. Retailers need to focus on delivering genuine value in the emails and maintain the relationship with their customers. Don’t try to get them to buy something they don’t want, help them save money on something they already want or need. Efforts to change customer behavior or drive impulse purchases for the benefit of the retailer will only kill the long-term potential of email programs.
To me, emailing customers with deep discounts and promotions with a desperate tone is a horrible practice–especially in a harsh economy. What is really required is for retailers to start delivering on the promise of targeted email marketing (driving toward the “promised land” of true one-to-one marketing). The more that retailers know about their customer (intelligence gathered through customer experience/satisfaction surveys and behavioral and attitudinal studies), the better able they’ll be to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Without that customer information, retailers are merely taking a “one message fits all” approach which will, as this article points out, fail.
Retailers that want to capitalize on the promise of email marketing must embrace the idea of it being a part of a holistic customer experience management program–one that leverages customer information and intelligence as opposed to treating email marketing as an island unto itself. “Blasting” email offers and deep discounts to a customer database results in cannibalizing the brand; personalizing offers and providing meaningful discounts that drive more frequent and larger purchases builds sales and the brand.
There are some email retailers like hocks.com, that maybe twice a year sends out an email. There are others like drugstore.com that send emails at least twice a week. And yet there are others like bargainoutfitters.com that send emails almost daily or at least every other day.
So when is “enough is enough”? I think some email recipients can only tolerate so many emails in a given week. I realize and already see that some of these e-retailers are starting to crank up the volume and frequency, even though we are still several weeks away from Black Monday.
Like the election campaign, this too will be over, but not soon enough for some of us.
I sign up for email alerts from plenty of merchants, simply so I can monitor how they’re marketing to consumers. And, yes, the email has been increasing. While it doesn’t annoy me, I can imagine the average shopper is likely to be near the breaking point. And that’s just what merchants don’t need now–to turn off the consumers they’re trying to reach.
More relevant email is a must. Consumers want to know that merchants understand their lifestyles, needs and product desires. Across their lifestyles, consumers view themselves as unique individuals, and custom email is one way to begin to treat them as such. The generic scattershot approach doesn’t even begin to get near that.
Amen to all of you. I maintain a junk email box that I use ONLY for online commerce, because I know that I’ll be spammed constantly. I don’t want to call out these companies because I work with them!…but spammers, you know who you are.
The holy grail for customers will be to opt IN to messages about things they care about. Imagine if The Home Depot allowed customers who were about to remodel a kitchen the ability to get information on appliances and cabinets, then opt out after the kitchen was finished? What about offering special-size customers the ability to get information about sales of apparel that fits them? What about allowing customers to self-identify themselves as moms of toddlers, or vegetarians, or golf nuts? Shoppers would respond, and retailers would have actionable information….
I have been involved in email marketing for 8 years, primarily in the E-grocery space, but in B2B as well.
Grocery is a tough market, as the consumer usually has little patience and isn’t interested in bells, whistles and entertainment. From that perspective, grocery and other FMCG might be a tad different than shoes or electronics or books. Consumers in grocery are quick to opt out if the program doesn’t adhere to or pay close attention to the three key attributes that consumers are looking for in this space.
I was recently talking to a fair sized company specializing in delivering targeted promotions to customers based on their grocery loyalty data. They have tried email but shifted to direct mail when their emails triggered a 2-3% “open” rate. My experience in both the e-grocery arena (MyWebGrocer) and in my B2B arenas (Panther Mountain, ShelfSnap) yield open rates of >25%.
The three key attributes?
CONTROL: I saw an interesting talk the other day about the ME consumer 2.0. More responsible than the ME 1.0 model, but very much a consumer who wants to be in control of their environment as much as possible (can you say Shopper Marketing?). So any effective email program allows the consumer to select AND change frequency, interests and method of delivery (phone, email etc.)
CONVENIENCE: This means the consumer’s view, not ours. Generally in grocery it means getting information about what they want, when they want it FAST, without a lot of hype and fancy pictures they have to wade through. Finally;
RELEVANCE: Of course. And keep the cross-sell or competitive sell to a minimum, if you don’t want to drive them into hiding.
Great subject!
Um, yes.
Permission to email is not permission to email twice a day.
Ideally, we would email customers when we have their favorite merchandise on sale, or if they’ve asked us for something that’s relatively hard to find–and we have it for them, and, better yet, we can offer it at a discount.
Also, I’ve developed a pet peeve in search results, but it should go double for email: The link should go directly to the item. Not the page where the thing is somewhere buried in the text, or where it might be halfway down the second fold, but right at the item I’m interested in.
In an email, I realize we’d like the recipient to come shop a while, but how bout just having a BUY NOW button that puts the thing right in the cart? Wouldn’t we like to make the sale instantly and monetize that campaign? Then let’s do a Keep Shopping button from the cart page. Online shopping is supposed to save me time and get me what I really want, really fast. Then we can add value after that. For now, let’s take the money and run.
Hopefully companies will monitor the number of people opting out of their emails and keep track of the timing of these decisions. What they will find it that too many irrelevant emails are not welcome. If email allows for direct, targeted communication, messages that are not relevant are offensive.
My experience has been that successful retailers are looking at the quality of the mailing list rather than quantity. It should not be treated as a numbers game.
Online retailers, instead of just investing in volume of e-mails, shoud consider investing in software that allows the messages of the e-mail to be more behaviorally relevant. I have opted out of about 10 already, and my favorite shoe store DSW is reaching the tipping point already.
I would gladly give my favorite online retailers a little more information about my preferences if they could accomodate more sophisticated targeting.
Max is correct…effective e-mail communication to consumers should trigger action, either through online shopping or by prompting a trip to the bricks-and-mortar store. Otherwise, too much communication becomes merely an annoyance and just a bunch of “noise” along with everyone else’s e-mails. Granted, consumers have the ability to opt out, but those who opted in to begin with should be considered among the most engaged potential customers. It’s important to treat them accordingly.
Email, in many ways, is no different than any other communication. If all you can do is scream an extra 10% off this weekend only, no wonder people are not opening and in fact opting out at greater rates. The smart retailers give out information with an, “oh, by the way here’s a deal.” But then, I’m probably preaching to the choir here….
Like everything else, this comes down to the consumer’s relationship with the brand. No relationship and too many emails = annoying. Great relationship and emails with valuable communications = welcomed and helpful. The challenge is to create the latter, where it feels like a message from a friend rather then a cheap sales pitch.
If the government treated email marketers like they do telemarketers they would all be in jail by now.
These companies should be embarrassed to call themselves marketers. They are anything but. How is being abusive to your better customers considered a good idea? Who within these marketing departments is actually saying, “why yes, let’s send another million emails to the same million people we emailed yesterday with the exact same offer.” Yeah…brilliant. Retailers that have an average frequency of 3x per year are sending out emails daily, even if you’ve been there in the past week.
Everyone I’ve talked to is opting out of email as quickly as they come, some even looking forward to getting them so they can rid them out of their lives–forever.
Free emails do not equate to free marketing. Such a shame that these retailers have invested millions of dollars over many years to build a loyal customer database, only to have some hack email manager kill the goose that laid the golden egg. That is a hefty price to pay for free email.