Ask Aunt May: Too Polite?

A friend of mine keeps asking why our mid-size business doesn’t send email messages to our customers. Our customers are loyal to us, very busy, and I don’t want to annoy them by marketing to their email inboxes. When I tell my friend this, she rolls her eyes. Am I missing something?

Too polite to email,
Omaha, NB

A: Dear Polite:

Let me put this as succinctly as I can. Yes, you are missing a great deal. Your friend is right.

Now that we have that out of the way, I have some ideas about a host of other ways you can stop “annoying” your customers unnecessarily:

1. When they transact business with you, they pay for the things (or services) that they get from you. Save 10 minutes off their transaction by eliminating that expensive and time-wasting step from the entire process.
2. Remove the video surveillance equipment from your place of business so that your customers don’t feel as though they’re being watched.
3. Don’t allow salespeople to make follow-up calls with new customers to make sure that things are going well.
4. In fact, don’t allow salespeople to call anyone who isn’t already a customer. If they need or want your service, they’ll find you.

Every one of those ideas makes about as much sense as your position on email marketing. But I don’t need to explain that to you – if you can read and you’ve picked up a single marketing textbook, marketing magazine, marketing newspaper or surfed a marketing web site any time this century, you know that already. By definition opt-in email marketing is a process of sending relevant information only to those people who specifically request it. When was the last time someone “annoyed” you by giving you exactly what you asked, exactly when you asked for?

But don’t take my word for it – ask your competition. They’re generating a multi-point lift in sales every month by “annoying” their customers this way. And, in the absence of email from you, they’re probably communicating with your customers as well!