Why Spammer Logic Around Blast Emails is Dangerous

Why Spammer Logic Around
Blast Emails Is Dangerous

Written by Rob Lane.

1. Overview

Just as Robert Jordan laid gazing at the sky on the brink in Hemingway’s classic For Whom The Bell Tolls, blast email marketing is breathing its last few breathes, but is still kicking around and being deployed by marketers who are not really paying attention to their customers or their bottom line.

The old spammer logic of 8-9 years ago says: “targeting is bad because it requires extra work, and reduces the number of people you can reach through an email blast.”

Let’s say, for example, that you have a total email list of 100,000 contacts and you have three products that you want to promote. Spammer logic argues that it’s better to send the same promotional email pitch to all 100,000 contacts, regardless of whether they have any interest in these particular products you are promoting, than to segment the list into smaller subsets and only promote to those people who actually care about the products.

2. Why Spammer Logic Fails With
Email Marketing Campaigns Today

The key elements that spammer logic fails to recognize are that by blanket bombing your entire email list you are:

Offending a large chunk of your customer list that you’ve spent countless hours and dollars building and cultivating.
Spending (and wasting) more money on sending spam email as your list gets larger.

To clearly demonstrate this point, let’s look at some numbers from a real life example. The figures are correct, but the names and products have been changed to protect the guilty.

Acme Stores wants to promote products A, B and C to their entire list of 68,612 customers. They run two parallel mailout campaigns.

Mailout Details

The outcome:

Revenue generated from both mailouts is almost identical at $743 and $615
The targeted mailout resulted in a significantly higher click through (engagement) rate
With the targeted email, 65, 954 less emails were sent, saving money on the scale of the campaign

While these points are important, they are not the biggest reason why spammer logic fails. The biggest reason to stop sending batch and blast emails is the significant difference in unsubscribe rates:

The blast email had 140 people unsubscribe and at an average customer lifetime value of $54.85 per customer, which means that you’ve just lost $7,679 in potential revenue
The targeted email had a much lower unsubscribe rate with only 1 customer unsubscribing

3. Targeting By Segments Is More Effective

Targeting through customer segmentation is not only a more efficient means of connecting your valued customers with specific offers from your product inventory that they are interested in, it also helps keep your unsubscribe rates low, while maintaining the integrity of your brand. These days, “A 1 percent complaint rate is high enough for major ESPs like Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail to block ALL of your emails entirely.”

Conversely, your customers will be pleasantly surprised when email comes in, through any device they happen to be online with, that is well designed and speaks to the specific wants and needs of their particular segment.

A great case in point comes from one of our pioneer customers SHOEme.ca, one of Canada’s fastest growing ecommerce companies, offering Canadians large discounts on top brands through their online store. After experiencing some initial success with paid search and email marketing, SHOEme.ca partnered with Rare and is very pleased with the above average click rates and conversions delivered through our targeted, personalized approach to email marketing. According to P.J. Worsfold, Vice President of digital strategy at SHOEme.ca, Rare has had a significant impact on their marketing planning and execution:

“Being able to see and understand the buying cycle of our customers makes it easier to plan our email marketing strategy… The highly personalized email campaigns fit perfectly with what we were trying to achieve with targeting, delivering robust one-to-one or one-to-few marketing to customers via email.”

4. Conclusion

If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.

Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.

Try Rare.io FREE!

And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.