You know the holiday shopping season is upon you when every trip to your physical mailbox you find it stuffed full of catalogs. Similarly, our email inboxes start to overflow as well — though this year it started earlier than usual. By the last week of October, I was getting daily– or even twice a day– emails from some of my favorite retailers.
Ugh!
Although I’m focusing in on one specific retailer with this photo, let me assure you there are a number of others also engaging in daily contact with their current/past customers.
But here’s the thing: no matter how much I love your company, once you start hitting my inbox daily, and with offers that are not tailored to me (I couldn’t fit a roaster into my apartment’s oven if I wanted to, and have bought all of my pots and pans from Macy’s), your emails become white noise.
So how do you avoid causing your customers to tune out to your messages, and cut through all this email clutter? By making sure that every email you send to them is targeted to their interests and past purchases, adheres to a customer contact strategy of no more than 1 email per week, and has a unique offer.
Target email content to customer interests
I’ve shopped at Williams-Sonoma a ton over the years, and it’s all been centered around baking and kitchen tools, and specialty food items. Given that context and the shopping data they should have on file about me, a few of these emails (10/30, 10/28) are on target with my interests, and two general offers (10/27, 10/29) could reasonably be assumed through data to be one that I’d respond to. If I’d received those emails over the course of several weeks, instead of in a span of 4 days, I might have considered the offers instead of leaving them unread in my inbox.
[Read more…] about Are You Spamming Your Best Customers’ Email Inboxes?
