Going one step deeper, if a brand is motivated to simply sell stuff, then the law of averages kicks in: the more people you can reach at once, the higher likelihood you’ll sell the product. In email marketing, this is referred to as “batch and blast” or “spray and pray.”
This one-size-fits-all style of marketing is very 1980 and goes against every form of customer-centric, data-driven marketing today. With the data at hand, brands can get highly granular with their marketing segmentation. Yet batch and blast is still a highly recurring trend; surprisingly, even among some of the top 1%!
Think of it this way: if you have revenue goals and KPIs to hit, you need to do everything possible to hit those numbers, so a brute-force attack on your email list sounds very appealing. If you dig deeper, though, you’ll find the real reason for batch and blast marketing: lack of marketing strategy or planning. Simply reading about the Pareto Principle will tell you that mailing to your best people will result in more revenue.
So, not only do brands use campaign planning inefficiently, they take it out on their customers, blasting them with emails to see what sticks. It’s extremely important to remember that behind every email is a person. When that person detects an indifference in how you communicate with them, they opt to churn, unsubscribe, or complain with the spam button.
Those disengaged customers lead to lower customer lifetime value, lower revenue, and more pressure to hit your numbers. That’s reason number two why brands fail at email. This marks the second reason and I will continue with the next one in my next blog post I will explain the rest of the reasons there.