SPAM-free Nervana is Possible… (mostly)
This article is about a few things that might be of interest. First of all, I did actually learn that I could reduce my daily inbox from hundreds of unwanted to emails to almost zero, and I’ve wanted to share my findings. As a marketing technology professional, I also wanted to share my thoughts on the importance of a good approach to customer privacy and communications preferences. And finally, I’d like to talk a little bit about email itself and whether companies are thinking about it right.
The Experiment
It didn’t start as an attempt to rid myself of spam. I was on a MarTech assessment project for a financial services client, and we were evaluating their existing customer communications preferences mart — or lack thereof. They had the bare minimum of a preferences page on their website, the minimum legally required, and it wasn’t integrated with their email providers built-in unsubscribe offering.
Really quickly, let me say that this pretty typical. Most companies have a really hard time integrating experiences for their known customers — i.e. ones who have somehow logged themselves in — with the anonymous or semi-anonymous customers who might just be associated with an email address. (If you’re evaluating a CDP offering, it’s worth asking yourself if it would or wouldn’t help with this specific scenario.)
Anyway, being a consultant, I decided to embark on an experiment to see firsthand how other companies tackled their customers’ communications preferences.
How was I going to do this? The answer was obvious: like most of us, I was drowning in unwanted email. I just decided that I would systematically “unsubscribe” from any emails that I would have normally deleted without reading.
Over the years, I had collected four email addresses: my work email, my primary personal email, a GMail account I have associated with a lot of the Google services I use, and a Yahoo! account that I used as my primary “spam-bait”, meaning I would give it only to companies that annoyingly would force me to provide an address to do some sort of required business. The spam-bate address was easy enough to deal with — I could multi-select hundreds of emails and bulk delete them. But even then, I would get about 200 emails every day, and my likelihood of missing something important was really high. If I ever came back from a long vacation, I could easily find myself wading through over a thousand “unread” emails.
My Methodology
My strategy was to start with the worst offenders—those companies that would send me a long, rambling, meaningless pitch of offers and recommended products or travel aspirations every single damned day. I figured that this would give me the best bang for the buck because, if successful, every unsubscribe would spare my mailbox 30 unwanted emails a month. Once I was done with that, I would go to the companies that were sending me things every week.
I started spending about 30 minutes every day. That might sound like a lot, but remember that I was doing this for an ongoing client engagement. I needed to be able to gauge how they compared for their overall industry, and I only had a couple weeks to complete this phase of the assessment.
In a way, I was lucky that this project was part of my work. If the original goal had been to become spam-free, I know I would have given up by the third day. After all, 30 minutes a day is really a lot of time, and I’m not the type to stick with tedious, repetitive tasks, even if they are good for me. The other challenge is that there was a delayed pay-off. I was surprised when many of the companies notified me that they would stop sending me email sometime in the next 20 days or longer!
How does this affect a company’s image?
Before I go into the results of the experiment, let’s reflect on how this impacts a company’s public facing perception. How would it strike you if Acme Housewares—even if you liked their products—told you that it was going to take 21 days to be able to figure out how to turn off their marketing department’s email spigot? Clearly, there is some fairly manual, batch process going on as customer lists are being collated and passed around between systems.
I suspect a lot of people don’t care about this sort of thing nearly as much as I do, being a career technologist. But these companies are exposing a hint of their internal sausage-making. You could say that since I’m unsubscribing anyway that I’m not as likely to be an important customer, but that would be bollacks—just because I’m not interested in your emails doesn’t mean I’m not still a likely shopper.
Additional Turn-offs
While I’m ranting about poor unsubscribe processes, here are a few more annoyances:
- Making me type my email address into the form — if I just clicked on unsubscribe from an email you sent me, you should already know what my email address is! This is most frustrating from my mobile device because it’s laborious to type from the touchscreen keyboard. (Hint: copy to your clipboard the first time you have to type it in to speed up subsequent unsubscribes.)
- Asking why I’m unsubscribing — this might seem like the company is genuinely caring to ask, but everyone has the same list. Maybe the ESP (email service provider) uses this as a trigger for detecting bad business partners, but I’m skeptical.
I’ll finally give the disclaimer that there’s always going to be a matter of prioritization. Streamlining your unsubscribe process isn’t going to be as important as consolidating, cleaning, and organizing your 1st party customer data. If your data systems are a mess and you don’t have a CDP yet, that should probably be the priority. And that’s where a lot of companies are right now.
Consent Management Platforms (CMP)
I’m surprised just how few companies—especially the retailers that have such an important ongoing relationship with customers—deploy a good consent management experience. This is what I found in the leading experiences in the space:
- Privacy policy and cookie use as well as Communication Preferences all under one well-organized roof
- Consistency for all users, whether they are only identified by an email address or they have full authenticated accounts
- Options for channel (email, SMS, etc.), frequency (at most once a month), and individual communications categories (news, promotions, offers) — and here one of the big challenges is getting that sweet-spot of having just the right number of options so the customer feels empowered while not being confronted by 20 “newsletters” to choose from.
The idea here is that customers should be thinking of “opting up or down” rather than opting out or in. CMPs such as OneTrust and TrustArc are leaders here. I’ve seen companies that have tried to create their own bespoke solutions, only to find that they’ve dug themselves into a hole that is hard to climb out of.
The Final Outcome (Drum-roll please!)
Back to my mass unsubscription effort! At first, it didn’t feel like I was making much progress. I wasn’t keeping daily record, but it still felt like I was wading through unwanted emails a few weeks down the line. But then that aforementioned lag time passed, and I could really tell that things were slowing down.
I wasn’t still doing 30 minutes of unsubscribing each day. To be honest, I probably did that only for the first three or four days. But as things went on, and as I could see substantial results, I got into a routine of unsubscribing from unwanted emails for about ten minutes every morning. If I had a few minutes to kill, like waiting in the lobby for a doctor appointment, I would pull out my phone and do a couple more unsubscribes.
The main point is that it actually worked… mostly. My primary email address gets almost zero new unwanted emails except obviously when I start engaging with a new company for the first time. (“Those shoes aren’t in stock, but we can ship them to you free. What’s your email address?”)
However, the other two email addresses (the Yahoo! and Google ones) still get plagued with periodic waves of spam. My unsubscribes will generally hold, but then someone who I suspect sells “prospecting lists” must sell my email because all of a sudden I’ll get spam from 10 similar-yet-different fly-by-night vendors. (No, I really don’t want a new Aspire credit card or some new “timeshare exchange” program!)
The Dark-SPAM
And there are definitely some bad actors out there, who will allegedly put a “click here to unsubscribe” link in the email, but it directs to a nonexistent or broken web page, or it won’t even be a link at all. Twice I clicked on an unsubscribe link and my browser revealed a warning page generated from my ASUS router saying that the content was being blocked because the IP address was known to have active malware!
I didn’t bother trying to unsubscribe from any obvious scammers—the ones hocking erectile dysfunction pills or free merchandise giveaways—as I figured they were more likely to get more aggressive having validation that my email address was still active. It doesn’t take long to develop a gut feeling for when an email is safe to unsubscribe from.
Some Final Reflections on E-Mail
Most of us are frustrated with what has become of email as a communication channel, to the point that some of us barely bother to check it. Ironically, it’s the channel for some of your most important communications, but for so many of us, the process of scanning through the daily deluge is impossible to maintain.
Between all the bad actors (i.e. scammers and hockers of meaningless junk) and all the companies that over-product unwanted and irrelevant emails, marketers have unwittingly deluded one of their most important resources. In an ideal world, if we could all agree to send fewer emails and to commit to keeping them focused and relevant, it would be a win-win scenario for all—companies and consumers alike—but obviously it’s never going to happen.
But a company can put thought and energy in making the most of this medium. Here is some advice based on my recent years consulting in this space:
Think holistically about how you use email as a channel
This can be hard, especially if your company is siloed with different teams using email for different purposes—regulatory announcements, functional purposes (e.g. receipts, notices, statements), nurturing campaigns, and prospecting. Yes, your company is comprised of many different departments, but if you want your customers to pay attention, you should remember that your brand has a single voice, and it shouldn’t be schizophrenic.
Move away from Campaigns and towards Customer Journeys
Think about the customer lifecycle as a progressive journey. In the precious few days and weeks after you get an email address from someone (whether you bought a prospect list or this person just “self-identified” somehow in your store or website) your messaging should be different. It’s like being on a first (or second) date, where you can better introduce your brand, establish the relationship, etc.
After those first few purchases or interactions, the relationship is still young. You probably want the person to try out your mobile app or learn about some of the perks of your loyalty program or do something that’s relationship building. If they aren’t responding, you should try something different. It gives the impression that your brand is listening. For your established customer, you should be doing something completely different. The tone and call-to-action and frequency should be different, as will your goals.
Marketing technology is rapidly evolving in this space. Companies like Salesforce, Adobe, Braze and ActionIQ have tools designed to get marketers out of the outdated “scheduled blast” mindset. They leverage the trending capabilities of the Customer Data Platform to surface meaningful contextual information (what’s going on right now with the customer) and historical information (what do we know about the customer’s persona) information to support this approach.
Always be experimenting — with a real purpose
Too many marketers try to optimize their activities for shallow outcomes, like getting a better email open or click-through rates. This isn’t going to help improve your communications’ relevance; just the opposite, you can end up delivering counter-productive clickbait.
Instead, step back and look at the bigger picture. What rhetorical questions can help you improve you deliver a customer-centric experience? One goal should be achieving that ideal cadence for each customer segment and for each stage of the customer lifecycle. In other words, try experimenting with that less-is-more ideal. Can you send customers fewer emails without cannibalizing overall engagement rates? As you experiment with content, are you looking at both the shallow (email open or click-through) and deeper (conversion or order frequency) outcomes? Is anything improving the shallow outcome at the expense of the deeper one?
The more successful marketers and marketing analytics teams are at this journey, the more we all will benefit down the road.