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Email as conversation, not invasion

Posted by Mathew Patterson on June 4, 2008

Have you ever really thought about the way email campaigns are sometimes described? Have you heard your clients talk about "email blasts" and "mail shots"? Sounds less like we are emailing our subscribers, and more like we are declaring war on them!

Without getting too carried away, it's clear that names are important. If our clients, and we ourselves think about our email campaigns as 'blasts', big one way transfers from us to them, we'll be tempted to act in ways we never would in a real conversation.

The more we see our audience as passive receivers of a mass message, the less likely we are to think about what works best for them instead of us. Email is such a personal medium, at least on the receiving end, and it's a dreadful waste of that intimacy to just throw out the same message to everyone.

So what do we do instead? I'm suggesting two courses of action here:

Stop using war metaphors like 'mail shot' and 'e-blast' right away. Encourage your clients to think about their emails as conversation starters and updates. It sounds small but it can really impact on their decision making.
Make your emails more personalized by using tools like segmenting, custom fields and analytics. It helps you to stop thinking of your readers as a single mass, and start considering them as individuals.

Treating people as individuals flows through to respecting their ability to unsubscribe at any time, and not hiding the link from them. It means wherever possible letting people email you back instead of discouraging two way contact.

Email should be a conversation, not an invasion.

3 comments so far

Justin D

wrote on June 4, 2008 5:11 PM

Well put. My entire methodology and principles for doing business online, are built on the concept of starting or continuing a conversation. Simply put, it's about managing relationships. You wouldn't yell at a current or potential customer, so why would you "blast" emails at them? Online communications should be conducted as if the person were standing in front of you, especially in e-commerce. Listening to what recipients have to say (analytics, feedback loops, etc.) and offering them solutions based on their needs (segmented/personalized emails), is key to conducting a healthy online conversation. There is definitely a larger conversation to be had, but I think you hit the nail right on the head.

Kay Smoljak

wrote on June 5, 2008 12:38 PM

On the personalization front, even "targeting" sounds combative! Personalization is a bit of an awkward word though... I wonder what else we can use? We need a whole new vocabulary for email :)

Anna

wrote on June 6, 2008 10:25 AM

A client of mine uses military metaphors all the time: "pull the trigger" was my least favorite. I agree with you that it's important to set the expectation of the client, and if you say you're going to try to have a conversation with your list of 1+M, it's more likely that you're going to convince them to implement a lifecycle strategy than saying: we're going to deploy unique email missiles to each target. Ha. Sigh. I see it as a journey, influencing old school marketers to use new fangled ideas like - getting away from the bulletin board advertising model and into the one on one small shop model. Great post.

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