Attention is a limited resource

Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

Patricia Faley of the Direct Marketing Association counters that businesses have […] the right to contact consumers without first obtaining their permission.
“We call it the ‘one bite at the apple’ rule,” she says. “Give me one chance to show you what I have to offer you, and if you don’t like it, then I won’t contact you again.”

The problem is the sheer number of companies who want to contact each consumer. Even if you limit that to companies the consumers purchase from it’s still an untenable number of contacts. Looking at my pantry right now, there are probably over 100 different brands I’ve purchased. Really, I don’t want every one of them to email me.
Increasing the amount of email sent,  beyond what the users want and outside of their control, weakens the email channel for everyone. Users get so much mail, that they don’t care about any of it. It’s just more noise in their inbox, distracting them from things they want to give their attention to.
Too much clutter in the inbox leads to user dissatisfaction and complaints to the mailbox providers. Those complaints lead the ISPs to want to improve the inbox experience for their users. One way to do that is to filter mail for the user, so that the user only gets mail they really want. ISPs call it engagement, but it’s really just describing how much attention users are giving to that marketer.
Marketers want every bit of attention they can. This isn’t a bad thing, but history shows that when provided with a channel with no price or external constraints that marketers swamp the channel and users revolt. Two obvious parallels to email in terms of cost and control are outbound phone and outbound faxing. Without any sort of control marketers increased frequency to the point where they ruined the channels and no one (or very few) can use those as marketing channels. Marketers tried to get users attention so forcefully that the users revolted.
Is this really where email is going?

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Just stop spamming!

Al posted a clip from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar on SpamResource (slightly NSFW) that resonated with me this week.
If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive. What this statement doesn’t tell people is that usually clients find me because they have been suspended by their ISP for spamming or blocked by some receiver.
Clients who find me because they can’t send mail usually hire me to solve their immediate problem. And I do give the the best advice I can to resolve their problem. But fixing today’s problem isn’t enough, you also need to fix the processes that caused the problem. To me, a critical part of my job is to set clients up for long term success by creating procedures that will get them delisted and keep them from being relisted in the future.
Sometimes, though, I have those moments Al is talking about. When clients don’t actually want to fix their problems, they just want to argue. They want to argue about the definition of spam. They want to argue about permission. They want to argue about how awful their ISPs are for suspending their account. They want to argue about CAN SPAM. They want to argue about free speech. They are angry and they want to fight.
My role is to listen to them, then guide them down a constructive path. I do turn out to be the sounding board for a lot of customers, sometimes they just need to know someone is listening to them. Once they get it all out we can move on into solving the problem.
But, boy, are there the occasional conversations where I just want to scream, “JUST STOP SPAMMING!”

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I have an adorable cat that I ‘taught’ that I would pet her if she tapped me on the arm or shoulder with her paw. It was cute for a while, but then she got more and more demanding. Eventually, she was clawing at my clothes and skin to get attention and petting.
It’s gotten to the point where I have to put a stop to it. She’s just getting too destructive to me and my clothing. So over the last two weeks I’ve been trying to only reward those touches that don’t involve claws and giving her a stern “NO CLAWS” when she does try to claw me.
As I was sitting here this afternoon, going through yet another round of NO CLAWS with her, I realized that my interactions with her were eerily similar to email marketing.
You see, Amelia started using her claws to get my attention because I didn’t always respond to her gentle taps. But claws hurt, and were a problem, so I would respond. This is exactly like marketers who don’t see a response to their email marketing campaigns and thus up the aggressiveness of those campaigns. More mail, more frequency, stronger offers, anything to get a response out of recipients.
Eventually, though, the recipient finally gets annoyed. The aggressive “taps” result in spam complaints. The sender has pushed the recipient from “it’s not so bad” to “make this sender stop bugging me.”
Email marketing is interruption marketing and there is only so much recipients will tolerate. And, trust me, few email marketers are as cute as my Amelia Cat.

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Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice.

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