Timing and targeting: why you shouldn’t blast all your customers with every offer

One question that we constantly come up against is why online retailers shouldn’t blast their entire customer base with every email promotion they create. Granted, most companies use some form of segmentation to track email responses (the usual 0-12 month buyers vs. 12-24 buyers is a common example) , but besides being defined by arbitrary recency and monetary spend cut-offs, these groups have no real bearing how the customers contained in those groups will respond to a given ad. My colleague Matt wrote a nice entry about this back in July (see Does your email response rate depend on how many emails you send?), but I recently came across some new metrics that I think help drive the point home.

25% of customers hit “Spam” or “Junk Mail” on email received from senders that send too much

Worse than an opt-out , getting assigned to a spam and junk mail filter means the retailer loses contact with customers without knowing it - your emails accumulate in the junk mail folder (most likely annoying the customer further if they ever check it) and you lose the ability to readjust your marketing communications to suit their needs.  (For more information on this see MarketingSherpa’s E-Mail Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008)

An estimated 244 billion promotional e-mails will be sent to US customers in 2008

And that number is expected to rise over the next 5 years. With consumers getting, on average, 24 emails a day, it’s becoming even more important to be relevant.  Jupiter Research has a great report on this (see  Optimizing E-mail Marketing in the New Era of Communication Tools) that emphasizes how consumers are no longer “able to pay attention to every message” and how it’s increasingly important for “marketers to be relevant and succinct when they send messages to consumers’ inboxes”.

Influence of non-targeted email fell by 7% this year

The same Jupiter Research report informs us that the number US consumers that believe email led to a purchase either online or offline fell by 7% from 2007 to 2008. While this might seem like a reason to pull back from all email marketing, a recent CMO Council article (Power of Personalization) stated that the majority of marketers that implemented personalization and targeting strategies saw an improvement in the influence of their email blast campaigns over the same period.

Although these metrics may just seem like trivia to most, when you start putting dollars behind these numbers, you find some real reasons to start better segmenting and targeting your email marketing. Even modest improvements in open rates can result in 10 of thousands of dollars in a very short period of time and, with most of these numbers expected to rise over the coming years, the difference between the dollars brought in through targeted and non-targeted marketing while only rise in the future.

Tags: email, Email Timing, Personalized Marketing

Add Personalized Product Recommendations to Your eCommerce Site

Istobe is a powerful recommendation engine that makes it easy to add recommendations to your eCommerce site. How powerful? Shoppers who click on Istobe recommendations spend 20-50% more than the average visitor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 9:11 am and is filed under Email Timing, Personalized Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.