Frequency and Relevance: Insight from Actual Recipients

Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC.
Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing.
Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence.
 

Huey:I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post.
Huey:About engagement, now that you mention it.
Laura:yes?
Huey:Why isn’t ‘engagement’ part of opting in? Why isn’t it a preference that the user can set?
• Stevecocks head
Huey:Having just now deleted the third LinkedIn email of the day, and previously gone on a f**king tear about Verizon-
Steve:Oh.
Steve:Yes.
Huey:Let’s look at organizations I interact with.
Huey:Facebook.
Steve:I get what you mean, but I don’t think “engagement” is the word. That’s more a metric than a choice.
Huey:I keep facebook open in a tab that’s near the top. And even when I’m KVMed into the other computer, Facebook is still live and scrolling on the computer I’m not using.
Huey:Why? Because Facebook has interesting things to tell me, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Huey:On the other hand: …how often do I need to hear from LinkedIn?
Huey:For me, once a month would be fine.
Huey:Not three f**king times a day, that’s for sure.
Steve:“Frequency” or something. “Things about your company I give a sh*t about”.
Huey:How often do I need to hear from Verizon?
Huey:How ’bout ‘Never’? Does ‘never’ work for you?
Huey:Seems to me that the business of capturing ‘engagement’ would be easier if the customer was engaged in the engagening.
Laura:Sadly, they don’t
Huey:“How often do you expect to hear from us?”
Laura:and linked in has a pretty extensive preference center
Laura:that lets you pick days or weeks or no mail
Laura:they don’t == users don’t engage with preference centers very much.
Huey:Honestly, LinkedIn haven’t annoyed me enough to go looking for it yet.
Steve:Linked-in doesn’t even have working unsub links.
Laura:and, yet, they’re pissing off some of their users by unsubbing people who don’t click on group links
Huey:On the other hand, if Verizon’s webpage had a button for “Kill all of you with a shovel”, I would write a bot that clicked that nonstop.
Steve:Click. Get challenged to log in. Log in. Get sent to page that doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe. Click around a bit. Find something mentioning email. Still no clue as to how to stop the f**king email.
Steve:(Feel free to use that quote)
Steve:When your recipients view you like that, every mail sent is a potential sales opportunity doused with gasoline and set on fire.
Huey:I would put out that fire.
Huey:By beating it vigorously with a shovel.
Huey:I’ve got a really nice six-foot oak-handled dirt spade that I could totally kill somebody with.
Huey:SEND ME A VERIZON SALESMAN.
Huey:…and if I sat down and thought about it for half an hour or so, I could probably come up with something coherent about engagement that didn’t include the vision of me clubbing a verizon salesbag to death with a shovel.
Huey:(which I’m guessing might be a deal-killer for the professional blog)
Steve:Nope. If it’s OK with you, I’m planning on taking this gentle chat and (after some light editing consisting moistly of s/f**king/f**king/) posting it tomorrow as “Insight from actual recipients”.
Huey:although I may still need to use the words “Seriously, Verizon: STFU and GTFO”.
Huey:Oh, very well then. Feel free to characterize me as a shovel-wielding homicidal maniac.
Laura:🙂
Steve:It’s Verizon. People will empathize.

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Happy Mailman Day!

For people who are on many discussion mailing lists, the first of every month is “Mailman Day”, and has been for nearly a decade.
Mailman is the most widely used mailing list manager for discussion lists and, by default, it sends email to all subscribers on the first of the month reminding them that they’re still subscribed to the list and how to unsubscribe. This is really useful, as I’m on some mailing lists that haven’t had any traffic other than the reminders in a couple of years, but it does mean that my mailbox looks like this this morning:

Discussion lists sending reminders is a close parallel to our usual recommendations for bulk mailing lists to send something at least monthly, so that recipients remember who you are and that they’re subscribed – and so that recipients who have vanished bounce that mail, so you can eventually remove them from your mailing list. (We’re not suggesting that you send a “this is a reminder” mail monthly – create some real content and send that).
Mailman Day also means that if you’re sending mail to a technical/internet-savvy demographic and you choose to send it first thing in the morning of the first of the month, you’re competing with a lot of noise in your recipient inbox. Unless you’re mailing daily it might be worth shifting a day forward or backward to avoid that conflict.

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Training recipients

Want to see a WWF style smackdown? Put a marketer and a delivery expert in a room and ask them to discuss frequency and whether or not more mail is better.
The marketer will point to the bottom line and how much more money they make when they increase frequency. The delivery expert will point to inbox rates and user engagement and point out that too much mail drives users to ignore the mail.
This isn’t actually unique to marketing mail. Send a lot of mail that doesn’t engage recipients and recipients are trained that they don’t have to actually pay attention to the mail. Some of them hit delete. Some may even report the mail as spam.
According to Cloudmark, this is exactly what happened when LinkedIn informed users of the recent data breach. They estimate that up to 4% of users who received the fully DKIM authenticated mail about the data breach deleted it immediately without reading it. This is higher than notification emails from other social networks.

Cloudmark suggests that part of the problem is that LinkedIn has an unclear opt-in process. Instead of asking users for preferences, LinkedIn assumes that all users want all the mail LinkedIn cares to send them. Then LinkedIn makes it difficult to find the page to change mail settings. This means recipients are very trained to ignore mail from LinkedIn. I know I ignore most of it. Anything that’s not a “want to connect” gets filed in the “I’ll read it when I’m bored” mailbox. So far I’ve not been bored enough to read any of it.
But I’m not sure it’s just about too much email. LinkedIn is a company that is heavily forged in phishing mail. Since May 1, just one of my email addresses has received over 50 messages purporting to be from LinkedIn.

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The frequency conundrum

What is the perfect frequency to send mail? Is it daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, minutely (is that even a word?) or randomly? Any number of experts will give you a definitive answer to this question, but I don’t believe there is a single answer.
The frequency recipients will respond to depends on the type of mail, the recipient expectations, the sender and a host of other factors.
For one example look at the mail sent by social networks. Many people, myself included, will accept dozens of emails a day telling me someone wrote on my Facebook wall or retweeted something I said or wants to link to my network on LinkedIn. Another example is when I’m traveling or waiting to pick up someone who is, I am thrilled to receive multiple updates an hour from the airline.
This willingness to receive frequent commercial or bulk emails doesn’t necessarily translate to marketing emails. When Sur la Table started sending double digit amounts of email a week, I down-subscribed, and had they not let me pick an acceptable-to-me frequency I would have unsubscribed completely.
A lot of marketing experts insist that mailers don’t send frequently enough. That increasing frequency increases ROI. What a lot of people miss are all the caveats in the fine print. In their minds, increasing frequency goes hand in hand with increased segmentation, targeting and recipient specific emails.
The idea isn’t simply to mail the entire list more frequently but to mail those who are more open to increased frequency. This is an idea I wholeheartedly support.

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