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This is the Police! STEP AWAY FROM THE SEND BUTTON!

Over-emailing your customer list is always, always bad marketing. There is absolutely no reason to think your customers want to get a special offer every day.

When you over-mail, you just turn happy customers who would be happy to hear from you occasionally into annoyed ex-customers.

So why do marketers do it?

Because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the math of email marketing:

  1. We drop an email blast to our opt-in list. Let’s say it’s one million names.
  2. We get one percent click-throughs and close 10 percent of them, giving us 1,000 new customers. So we think it was a success.
  3. But 10,000 people don’t remember opting in. So they get angry and decide never to buy from us again. And they each tell five friends that we spammed them.
  4. And another 10,000 are just annoyed. And they each tell five friends.

How many customers did we lose forever? Is their potential lifetime value greater than the value of the new accounts we acquired? What is the lost revenue from current customers who left because they think we are spamming? What happens when people start blogging that we spammed them?

Things Remembered

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