Do Not Abuse Your Email List
Real life events drive today’s post. I realize that times are tough right now, the economy is in recession, and business is hurting, BUT abusing your existing customers with excessive email is not a sound plan for immediate or future success.
As an example there is a men’s clothing store I order from online, I have always been please with their product quality and the service level is typical of an online business, in other words nothing special but not bad either.
For the last 2 months they have increased their emails from one every 2 weeks to almost daily, Every email is the same, advertising deep discounts of 60-80% off. As you can imagine I am sick of them showing up in my inbox.
So even after they agitated me, most people would simply have unsubscribed leaving them with one less customer, I decided to cut them some slack. I went to their web site, and the process for changing your subscription was hard to find and difficult, in the hopes of keeping in contact with them for future purchases but to stop this annoying email list abuse.
After all of the hoops they made me jump through, I finally changed my status from whenever to monthly emails. Problem solved right? Wrong, they apparently ignored my request and still sent me emails almost daily.
The end result is I went to back to their site to unsubscribe completely, I added their domain to my spam filters, and they will not be contacting me anymore. They lost the ability to reach me even when they had a legitimate offer, and I am so displeased with the process that I won’t be using them in the future period. The truly sad part is I am sure they are experiencing the same thing with a lot of their other customers.
Lesson they should have learned is that abusing your email list will not produce enough revenue in the short term to balance the loss of revenue long term. It also brings into play the old but still very true rule of thumb that “it’s cheaper and easier to keep existing customers than to attract new ones.”
One other little marketing tip of note, I mentioned they were advertising deep discounts of 60-80%, which is just a terrible marketing decision. That big a discount makes me worry about their viability and future existence, what if I bought something and wasn’t happy with it? Would they be there in a week so I could return it if needed, or would they be out of business, in this recession? They would have been far better off framing there marketing message to the tune of “we understand times are tight right now, so we have decided to offer our loyal customers some deep discounts to help them weather the current economy” or something to that affect. This would have made me appreciate the company more, I wouldn’t be wondering whether they would be in business next week because no indication was given, and I probably would have even been more understanding about the to frequent emails.
