I read something Dr John Levine wrote about the ubiquity of advertising, and it tied into some thoughts I've been having regarding the parallels between marketing and swearwords.
There's a word that starts with F and ends with K and we all know what it is. It used to be a very, very bad word. It was a shocking word, a word so bad that kids would get their mouth washed out with soap for using it. Carlin included it in his "words you can't say on TV". It was a word that you Just Did Not Say. These days, though, it's been so overused, so ubiquitous, and is so very common that it has entirely lost its shock value. You hear it everywhere. Kids say it. Parents say it. You hear it at work, on the radio, and on TV. Jokes are made about it. It's just not a big deal any more. Heck, I say it to my Dad. It's gone the way of the dodo.
Seems to me that advertising is following in its footsteps. Dr Levine said:
We are bombarded by ads from the moment we get up until the moment we go to sleep. There's ads on the radio, ads on TV, ads in the newspaper, ads on billboards, ads on the bus, ads on the fricking steps in the NYC subway. In my physical mailbox, where I used to throw away about one worthless little newspaper full of ads a week, now it's one or two a day.
It's true. Advertising is so common and so overused that we just don't see it any more. The more it is pushed at us, the more avenues are used to put it in front of us, the less we see it, the less we WANT to see it, out of sheer self-defense. I myself make extensive use of Ad-Block, my TiVo, and the Bayesian filters on my personal email. If I didn't ask for a specific advertising mail, I mark it as spam, and ignore it henceforth unless it becomes annoying enough to trigger me into running the IPs for their stats. 99% of the time they're awful, and you can guess what happens next.
People's behavior with advertising reminds me of the self-defensive behavior people in seriously over-crowded cities exhibit: they rush along, looking at a fixed point in front of them, don't look at other people, don't deviate from their paths, and if something gets in their way they get *angry*. People are reaching the tipping point with advertising - over-saturation, overexposure, over-everything. They can't escape the billboards and bus ads and subway ads, the ads over the air in the stores they shop in, and the billion other exposures they cannot control, so they get particularly agitated about the ads that encroach on space they feel is their private property: their email inboxes. They're getting angry, and unlike me they have little to no recourse to do anything about it. So...they just get angrier.
Unless email marketing wants to go the way of the F word and the dodo, I think it is high time this phenomenon was given due consideration. The constant bombardment only makes people pay less attention and get more angry, and that isn't what email marketers want.
So, folks, what's the solution?
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Even if every marketer reading this blog were to clean up their own acts, it wouldn't be enough; they also need to pressure their peers, and clean up their entire industry.
Agreed, JD, and if they won't do it, ultimately someone else will. I've been hearing rumblings about that solution, recently.
(Preface: really enjoying another receiver perspective on email and email marketing - thanks for the blog)
I think you can go back to the early days of email marketing. The idea then was almost that your emails were a service. It let people keep up with new, interesting material at your website etc. without having to check themselves. It was the premise behind the email newsletter, which was also designed to deliver real value for its own sake and so that people would remember you (and, yes, maybe buy from you next time they need what you sell).
That model is a minority now, but I see slow change. Thanks at least in part to the growing role of user interaction in deliverability. For example, retailers putting useful content in their emails. Instead of just bombarding the recipient with more ads for digital cameras (because she bought one once), they're maybe offering articles on how to get more out of her purchase with tips and advice. Delivering value and selling at the same time.
But like JD says, the problem isn't the marketers who read this blog and the "best practice" marketing blogs. It's the others. After all, no such blog has recommended buying an email list for probably a decade. And yet it's still one of the most popular questions I get: where can I buy an email list?
Mark: thanks for the welcome. As to "where can I buy a list?" - that's just wretchedly depressing.