Please stop SHOUTING and just talk to me

Maybe I'm getting grumpier as I get older but I am increasingly fed up with the emails most companies send me. I would like to think that email is a tool for engaging, relevant, personalised communications. It would even be nice to believe that people follow Drayton Bird's maxim of only sending direct communications that will make people say 'how nice of them to think of me'.

 If only they did… the web is littered with research from companies like Forrester, Jupiter, Peppers and Rogers, and Core Metrics who have shown that organisations using engaging, personalised communications will get better conversion rates than the one-size-fits-all merchants.Indeed, a trawl though my inbox reveals that very few companies are using the basic direct-marketing principles of segmentation and personalisation. 

As a result, customers are subjected to the email equivalent of Cillit Bang TV ads, with companies SHOUTING offers at them with no consideration about their relationship with each other. 

Here are a couple of examples…

I have been the customer of a children's clothing company for about six years (no naming and shaming!) and they have a huge amount of data that they could use to sell to me more effectively. 

From my post-code alone they could make some inference about life-stage and affluence using one of the many geo-demographic targeting tools out there. But they can do more than that…they have transactional data going back in time and could infer what ages my children are, what types of products they suit and what time of year my wife decides to add a few things to their wardrobes.  Sprinkle in some web and email clickstream data and they would also know what products I've been looking at but not bought. 

So with all this wonderful, granular data what do they send?

A one-size fits all, shouting, non-personalised 10% discount offer. 

Well thanks but no thanks. No click-through, no browsing, no sale and no residual branding benefit. Still, at least it only cost them half a penny to disappoint me. 

And here's a travel company that knows who I am. They breathlessly announce 'Special offers from your local airport' and then go through a list of cheap flights from Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool and Durham before remembering that I live 10 minutes from Gatwick. 

If somebody spoke to me in such an irrelevant way on the phone or face-to-face I'd probably switch off. So why, when email is such a wonderfully personalisable (is that a proper word?) medium, do so many companies not bother?

Engaging and relevant messaging takes time to craft and needs meaningful data to process but should not be beyond the reach of any email marketer. 

How about just segmenting between customers and prospects and speaking to these two groups differently? Or making reference to the products I may have bought in the past, or the last time I visited your web site? 

I used to think that inserting 'Dear <title> <lastname>' was not engaging in email, as we have been doing that in mail merges offline for 40 years and we can be so much more creative. 

But maybe we need to get back to basics and remember that we can personalise so many elements of email messages… different 'from' fields, attention-grabbing subject lines, opening paragraphs that develop a relationship. Oh yes and offers based on my transactional history or where I live would be nice too. 

I promise that I, for one, will click through to see what you have to offer me and if only a few percent more do the same, then your email marketing will magically have become more successful.

Click here to discover how you can make your email content relevant to each recipient