A memo to marketing professionals

There once was a time when direct mail was king.  Then we all started to get too much of it and it became junk mail.

The problem was targeting, or lack of it.  Most of what we received wasn’t relevant to us when we received it, but companies still sent it because occasionally somebody bought a product or two.

Smart companies worked on improving both the content and targeting of direct mail when other companies just widened the net and sent more irrelevant messages to more people at the wrong time. 

Then there was e-mail, which was much cheaper than direct mail.  Smart companies moved their marketing spend to this new channel and probably achieved some great results when only a very few organisations were using e-mail for marketing purposes.

Unfortunately e-mail marketing has become spam.

I receive, on average, 60 marketing related e-mails every day.  It’s noise in the system and my six personal e-mail accounts are just a mess.  One of them has over 7,000 unread items.  I check my personal e-mail once or twice a week and I scan it, I don’t read it.  And when I say I scan it, I scan the subject line and note who e-mails are from.  Only if a message happens to be open in preview might I scan the contents.

If a company wants my attention they really will have to try a little harder.