or business-to-consumer, if you send a message through to somebody that’s relevant to what they’re thinking about at the time, you are far, far, far more likely to get a purchase.
NJ: Is there ‘best practice’ for handling opt outs? MW: All good things must come to an end: and sometimes people opt out of your lists. You have a legal obligation – particularly if you’re B2C but I think in most cases with B2B some people have a legal obligation – to offer a simple way to opt out of every email communication. Best practice says you should do so with good grace. If somebody’s opting out of receiving email from you it might be because they want to sign up with a different email address. It might not be that they want to actually to say goodbye, they just want to say goodbye from here so they can say hello from over here. It might just be that actually they don’t really want your emails but they still want to buy stuff from you. It could be any number of reasons so be nice to people as they go.
NJ: You mentioned before that historically marketing has been about shouting at your audience, and email is a conversation, should you employ a different tone of voice? MW: Yes, emails are conversation, be polite. Email started as a way for people to talk to each other across machines. It’s become a way for customers and marketers to talk to each other; think about how that impacts the way in which you communicate with them. You no longer just have the right just to shout at people. And if you do want to do that, email is not the place to do it.
NJ: Is this symptomatic of a shift in the marketing industry as a whole? MW: Yes, as the media landscape gets more and more cluttered and people get better and better at personally or with technology, filtering out communications. Think of your SkyPlus box for example, filtering out TV ads is one of the reasons people cite for getting one.
HIT ME! HOW TO GET YOUR BUSINESS TO PUNCH ITS WEIGHT 0NLINE 47
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