Ray Collis

Buyers Warn: If You Don’t Filter Your List, We’ll Filter Your Marketing!

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Marketers – Choose your words carefully!

I recently joined a few online groups of interest.  To weeks and over one thousand emails latter, I un-subscribed in exasperation.  The lesson for marketing is clear – choose your words carefully.

The reality is that the more sellers fail to filter their marketing, the more buyers will filter it for them.  No more is this clear than in respect of email marketing.  The result is that your email marketing is likely to end up in a black hole together with a bundle of viagra emails.

Creating and sustaining a conversation with the prospect is one of the great challenges of today’s marketing.  But the equivalent of marketing blitzkrieg – bombardment with emails or any other marketing, is not the answer.  It is time for discipline and science to become the new buzz-words in marketing.

The Marketing Monologue

The reality is that the monologue is still the default setting in terms of marketing communication.  This is at the core of the issue of marketing effectiveness.  After all, what is the use in creating and sending lots of brochures, emails, or anything else that marketing may have at its disposal, unless customers are going to read them.

The broadcast mindset that prevails marketing and despite the new technology at the marketer’s disposal the era of precision marketing communication is still some way off.

The fact that there is a ‘one message for all’ approach is part of the problem.

It’s About Respect

The more the message is tailored to my specific interests the more likely I am to read it.  That sounds simple, but here is the hard part for marketers – they must hold off on sending me stuff that may not be of interest.  However, as it costs the same to send one email as a thousand, they generally don’t.

More to the point they don’t respect their customers and prospects enough not to send them junk email.  Yes, the amount of junk mail you receive from any seller is a measure of that suppliers respect, as well as the degree of science and discipline inherent in their marketing.

But broadcast marketing is only half the problem.  Here is the real issue for me – I don’t mind getting the same message as everybody else, including some that may not be immediately relevant to me, as long as I don’t get too many of them!

Buyers Ask: ‘Will You Filter, Or Will I?’

The only problem is that mass marketing tends to be exactly that, one message suits all, hundreds of times over.  The result is that out inboxes are overflowing.   Email marketing continually mistakes quantity for quality.

Buyers have the last word however.  If marketers won’t filter what they send us, then our email filters will do it for them.  The problem for marketers is that the buyer’s email filters can be overly zealous, they may just filter everything!

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