I am furious. I mean; seriously!

Every single day my Google Gmail account receives loads of EMAIL newsletters, promotional emails and offerings via email as well as invitations to seminars, webinars and surveys. And that is all fine — after all I have subscribed to receive the stuff at some point.

But I cannot get over that the “one size fits” all approach is still the method of choice for the vast majority of email marketers. They do not even pretend to care about my needs, my interests, what is relevant to me, what makes me tick, what is likely to win my business etc.

If it wasn’t for my professional interest in staying current, I would have opted-out (unsubscribed) a long time ago.

So these days I ask myself, when will marketers finally
open their eyes and smell the coffee?

Why don’t marketers take a quick look at the large selection of (email) marketing automation vendors offering easy to use and relatively inexpensive tools enabling marketers to
individualize the communication? Why should they, you ask?

Don’t spam me until I die
Well it is indeed a very easy question to answer. Because if marketing accountability is important and if customer experience is important, it is evident that an individualized approach to each lead or customer is many times more effective than a “one size fits” all approach. And what’s more the side-effects are attractive too;

- an increase in the customer experience helps build, sustain and develop your reputation
- a good reputation supports your referral (word of mouth) mechanisms
- relevant communication is far more likely to decrease the permission opt-out rate
- relevant communication pr.definition increase the consumer interest in the messages the marketer is sending. Consumers will read and decide on your offering more frequently than they do with your current one size fits all approach

Email communication overload is indeed a problem for all marketers. While it is not the only problem, it is a big part of it.

Since this is a Furious Michael Article,  I have to keep it short and save the rest of that discussion for a future post.

If you want to learn more about permission based email marketing, consider participating at FEDMA’s Participation Certification awarding permission marketing ABC course taking place in September 2008.