The ‘Coming soon’-Experiment

Every morning when I open Outlook people tell me I should buy Viagra, ‘bang’ her harder and that some things could be taller (how do they know right?).  Fact is I spend about 15 minutes every day to delete everything that isn’t important from my mailbox, and I guess I’m lucky compared to other people.

I don’t have anything against e-mail marketing, but it’s just too much.  Even companies I signed up with for a reason start spamming as soon as company targets aren’t met.  It makes sense, it’s cheap, it’s fast and it shows results, so why wouldn’t they?  And I even think that we wouldn’t have a problem with unsollicited e-mails as long as they met a few basic needs.  Inform.  Trust.  Moderation.

Basically it all comes down to making promises and keeping them, that’s it.  So I did a little experiment.  For an event we hosted I had to send a lot of information to the participants combined with some extra promo.  I had to send 6 e-mails over the course of two weeks, all about the same event.  Lots of people would find that annoying.  In the first mail I sent, I told them I would send 5 more mails.  I even gave the exact dates when they would arrive.  No-one complained, I even got some positive feedback about the way we handled the information flow towards participants.

Expecting something makes it more acceptable.  If you really can convince people to sign up for your newsletter, and you told them they would receive it 3 times a week.  They may unsubcribe if the content isn’t up to par, but at least, they won’t get tired of it.  It’s important to keep your promises and create value even if you just want to make a sale.

Similar Posts:

• 8 ways to lose a customer
• Networking Thursday: Expect nothing, give everything
• I really love my work

Tagged as: e-mail marketing, expectation, spam