Top of the Mind or In their Face? Choose your Strategy

Email marketers of the world, pay attention: split your lists. I beg you.

I really don’t mind being marketed to by email. I do mind being marketed to by email every single day.

I get it, you have sales targets to hit, and email campaigns work, but there’s only so many pieces of furniture I’m going to buy in a week.

The fact is: you don’t have to email everyone all of the time, just because you can. Instead of being top of my mind, I would describe the email marketing approach of many retailers as “in your fucking face”. Aggression intended.

I bought new kitchen table chairs last week.

Now, after a week of being sold side tables, sofas, coffee tables, beds and a whole host of other things I just don’t need right now, I’m done. I’ve unsubscribed.

No biggie, I hear you say. There’s loads of subscribers, you’ll not be missed.

Except you’ve damaged your brand too. I’m going to remember how you invaded my inbox every day like a sugar-hyped toddler screaming BUY BUY BUY! I’m looking at you, Wayfair.

My kitchen chairs are nice, I like them. But for pity’s sake, get a hold of yourself – I do not now need an entire house full of furniture to accompany them.

This is not just a furniture shop issue. Socks. Shoes. Clothes. Towels. Mobile phone contracts. Every bloody day I delete a litany of emails from shops I bought something from once, and forevermore sentenced myself to being reminded that I really need a new hair clip every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, until the end of bloody time.

If you are part of this, you need to stop and take a beat.

There’s a cost of eroding the trust of your customers. There’s a cost to irritating your customers. There’s a cost to losing subscribers. You are literally overwhelming your customers because someone gave you access to a MailChimp subscription plan and forgot to set up some guard rails.

If the purpose of marketing is to create and keep a customer, your over-keen email marketing efforts are failing at hurdle number two.

Sometimes less is more.

Here are just four practical tips on how you can adjust your email marketing approach and improve sales.

Yes, you heard that right, improve sales.

1. Split your list. This is honestly so simple to do, doesn’t require any understanding beyond how the alphabet works, and it will transform both your open rates and your purchase rates. We have one customer who has List A and List B. Instead of emailing everyone about everything, they send List A comms on Monday, List B on a Tuesday, they have a wee break, then mail List B on a Thursday, and List A on the Friday. On Saturday everyone gets the same email. This approach has smoothed out their sales spikes, increased average daily sales by 6% and improved their average order value. All we did was arbitrarily split their mailing list in two. No witchcraft, just less bombardment.
2. Segment your List. This is marketing 101. But do it thoughtfully. If someone buys chairs, don’t segment them as “chair buyers” – that’s just careless segmentation. There’s other segments you could create – people who like bright colours, women, men, people who have tables, geography, socio-demographics if you can access that data. Once you’ve segmented, adjust your copy and content to talk directly to their needs. If someone has bought bright yellow velvet chairs, sending them a “bright yellow edit” with interior design ideas will be more effective than “side tables and TV consoles”.
3. Set your Schedule. This is underestimated. From some marketers I can get more than one email in the same day. Like seriously? Why?? They are on the fast track to unsubscribe on my list. What great offer did you forget to tell me at 10am that you seriously need to mail me about at 3pm? Please, calm the fuck down on the frequency. You might care deeply and passionately about your socks, and I am sure they are lovely and soft, but I’m not that dialled in. Set up an email schedule in advance and adhere to it strictly. Pretend you are a daily newspaper or a weekly magazine. Whatever works for you. We set up a weekly campaign schedule for one client, same day, same time, every week and – guess what – their sales went up. Instead of peaks and troughs in their monthly sales cycle, they started to grow, consistently. The holy grail.
4. Use the Exclusion Option. If you are using MailChimp, this is built in. Other mailing platforms do it too. You can send to your whole list but exclude the segmented list your emailed yesterday. Their inbox and sanity will thank you for it, quietly. But that’s not fair, I hear you claim, not everyone will get every offer – we must treat all our customers equally! Nonsense. You are running a business, not a democracy. In store offers come and go, and who gets access to them depends on who’s lucky enough to be there at the time (when they choose to go shopping, I might add). Save your deals comms for onsite conversion tactics. There’s no need to stage a national alert pattern. You are not the Government.

As marketers, we’re caught in a trap that makes email marketing look like the low cost option to drive sales. It’s effective, for sure. But it’s not cheap.

Email marketing is a very costly business. Here’s how costly it really is:

Cold Hard Cash
It costs money to host databases and run the email services, and if your dataset is sizeable, that cost will be high too. The bigger the list, the bigger the cost.

Customer Attrition
It costs you the attention of that hard earned customer if they decide to unsubscribe.

Brand Reputation
It costs you brand reputation by creating negativity because you have breached a psychological contract on how often is too often to press send.

Carbon Footprint
It costs carbon and therefore, there’s a planetary cost to your “keeping in touch” policy. Tim Berners Lee estimates that the carbon cost of email is increasing, calculating that “average email usage” is equivalent to driving a small petrol car for around 128 miles. If you are serious about Net Zero targets then you need to address your email marketing addiction as part of that.

Regulatory Fines
It could cost you a fine. Data use is highly regulated, and consent is aggressively monitored. It only takes one customer to complain to the relevant authority to kick start an investigation. When retailer Halfords sent an email out to half a million customers to help them fix their bike, they thought they were doing a good thing. That one campaign cost them a £30,000 fine. It also cost them the loss of 2000 customers who unsubscribed from their list. Forever.

Having just deleted the 29 marketing emails this morning that came in to my inbox overnight to sell me pants, glasses, gigs, mobile phones, a cruise, flights, shoes, clothes and cheaper energy deals, the urgent re-evaluation of your email marketing schedules would be greatly appreciated.

It’s just too much.

There’s more where this came from. I share more of my thinking on Cunningly Good Marketer on Substack. Subscribe to get my opinions, experience and real-world lessons straight to your inbox.