Two mistakes made by email marketers

Having someone's email address is of high value, and carries with it great responsibility.

For marketers, there is constant tension in how to handle the email addresses within their database, knowing the degradation rate each year.

And, many of them tend to make two primary mistakes:

1. Emailing too often

What prompted this blog post for me this morning was the fact that within a span of 30 minutes I received two emails from Rosetta Stone -- both pertaining to the same content centered around Valentine's Day. The first one had a title of "Ignite Your Child's Love of Language" and arrived at 9:13 a.m. this morning. The second one arrived at 9:37 a.m. with the title "Your Special Offer Has Arrived."

Each morning for the past week I have received an email from Rosetta Stone. But, they are not the worst. That would fall to My Publisher, in my opinion. Rosetta Stone is at least trying to offer some content-oriented incentive (love of learning, enriching experience, etc.) whereas My Publisher, in the words of Meghan Trainor, is all about the discount, bout the discount, bout the discount - no full price.

2. Not emailing often enough

I sign up for Inbound marketing from different companies to watch and learn how they utilize the permission being granted to them. And while most companies tend to make the mistake listed above, there are others that tend to be too hesitant in the use of their email database.

In today's short-attention-span world, is an email once a month enough to keep your database of families engaged?

The goal is to find that middle ground where you are contacting them regularly enough to illicit positive behavior from them, but not too often that it becomes a commodity, or worse a nuisance in their inbox.

Sure, content is the main driver, and that is expected here in this discussion -- give them something that is valuable to them (other than just discounts). But, with all of the CRM tools available today, companies should be able to determine where that middle ground of frequency lies based on the analytic information at their disposal.

Who do you think is doing the Inbound Marketing right? Who are those that are bombarding you? Interested to hear your thoughts.

houston@figment-consulting.com