Be Good To Your Customer & Respect Their In-Box!
Small Business Insights: Marketing
My wife recently signed up with the Kohls mailing list in an effort to secure the occasional coupon and special offer as we entered the back to school and consumer-spending-frenzied-fourth quarter. And because she’s been around me just long enough, she used our mutual Yahoo email address vs. her personal account. And in case anyone wasn’t listening closely let me repeat that little pearl of advice: Secure a Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail account and use them specifically for mailing lists, registrations, and similarly disposable instances. They are easy to get, plentiful and available from any machine with an internet connection.
The first marketing email came in this past Monday and congratulations to them for keeping very close tabs on new sign-ups and getting right to work. As one that spent several years in retail internet marketing, I know that’s important. And with retail taking it’s current economic beating, it’s the cost-efficient life-blood of most companies that are paying attention.
Then Tuesday came along. And another marketing email from Kohls.
The sun rose on Wednesday and my inbox was swollen with another offer from Kohls
As I logged in this morning–you guessed it–Kohls was back like a toe fungus.
I was hip to the marketing groove by day two so the UNSUBSCRIBE option was taken on Tuesday. They threw in the broad caveat that I might still get marketing emails for a couple of days while the request was processed. Funny how you can be added overnight but to be removed, it takes several days. Things that make you go “hmmmm”
What the marketing team at Kohls has done is abuse their marketing mailing list. They abused the consumer by bloating their inbox day in and day out and risk numbing the consumer to their message. One day Kohls will want to ‘give away the store’ with ‘super savings’ but because they’ve nuked me with daily messages, they’ve trained mailing list users to either ignore (and delete without viewing) the marketing message that’s become email ‘white noise’ or simply scan and perhaps ‘miss’ the marketing target.
Or in my case, they might simply annoy me. Plain and simple. Call me a cad, but if my best friend wrote me every day it would get old and tedious.