• by Jordan Ayan , June 10, 2009

I read a great blog post by Seth Godin this week where he challenged the reader to "not be boring." With email, it is easy to get stuck in a rut and send a message that lacks anything that will interest the majority of your readers. Every once in a while, it is worth stepping back, looking at your messages and asking the question, is this message boring?

To my mind, mass retailers are among the most public examples of emailers who don't get the concept of not boring the reader. I went into my inbox to look at some examples, and was shocked to see how prevalent a mass marketing mentality is across the retail channel. Many of the names we love to shop with are treating their messages like Sunday newspaper supplements.

I enjoy shopping at Restoration Hardware stores, but I really don't want to hear from them almost every day (they sent me 21 messages in the month of May). So, like many of their customers, I just tune them out; I don't even see their messages any more. They are not alone. Many top-line retailers, whose stores I like shopping in, bombard my inbox with their blast concept of email marketing. During the same time period I received 16 messages from Talbots (I made a purchase for my wife), nine from Williams-Sonoma, eight from J. Crew, 12 from J. Jill and 11 from Nordstrom. These are just the few that I looked at, not all messages from retailers that made it into my inbox.

I've targeted the retail set in this discussion because they seem to be the biggest offenders of this blast concept these days. They are by no means the only firms that mail their lists too often. I know that the economy is tight, and they want to get consumers into their stores, or buying from them online, but at what cost?

None of these firms are bad marketers, so I'm guessing they have done some testing to show them that this frequency is good for them, but are they potentially losing more sales that they might have gained if they were targeting with relevant offers? In my mind the tests are only valuable if you are testing them against something more targeted. If you're mailing the same message with two different subject lines, it isn't so much a test of effectiveness, but a test of which message is the least "not effective." Additionally, they are "polluting the stream," so to speak, by over-mailing, which changes consumer's perspective of email, ultimately impacting every company's ability to reach that consumer.

What happens to your messages when you mail too often? You change consumer behavior. First they screen you out, then they are likely to ignore you. They might set up filters to filter you off into inbox purgatory, or they might set up a separate account for all commercial messages. In all these situations, retailers lose -- because they can no longer use email to reach this audience.. And consumer lose because they don't receive relevant offers from a retailer they like doing business with.

As marketers we often have an overinflated sense of our product or company's worth in the eyes of an email recipient. Before you hit the send button for your next campaign, put yourself in the recipient's shoes and ask yourself how the message will be perceived. If you can't see solid value in it -- something that will excite, entice, generate buzz, create interest, or grab attention -- go back to the drawing board.

For success, your message has to deliver meaningful or interesting content in a timely manner that is not intrusive. Fundamentally it needs to answer the age-old question, WIIFM (what's in it for me), to have a chance in today's marketplace. If you can't honestly answer when you examine it, perhaps it is time for a change. The reality is, you can buy and send all of the email messages you want, but you can't buy attention.