Oh Man, I Need Someone to Help Me With My Mass Advertisements Emails.
Perhaps the option to unsubscribe from emails is my favorite part of email advertising services.
To be honest, the biggest culture shock when I moved to the U.S. is the email and text message marketing culture. Regardless of which website you shop at and sign up for membership, you need to provide an email address to register. The first time I used it, I didn’t know that I need to reject receiving follow-up information after submitting my email (and later I found that not all companies have this lovely option). So after just a week in the United States, my mailbox from almost nothing to huge information exploded. Every time I open the mailbox, I need to take a deep breath because I always get anxious about seeing new messages.
Even though I got so many new emails every day, I rarely check them. It may be because of my habits and culture, I main read the collated and extracted information on a social media account conducted by a Chinese team. It will tell me the best value discounts. Or I usually read others' comments and posts about a flashing discount promotion. I like to read people’s reviews and recommendations to learn about a brand and product. Even if it’s a super good deal on a sale, I will look carefully to see if the product works. I’m more willing to trust the recommendations of older consumers than if the brand sent them to me directly.
But even if I were to read these emails, would the message alone be enough to entice me to buy the product?
While I prepare for my digital marketing class, I noticed many articles focusing on talking about how to make email marketing effective. They talk about what do you need to care about when doing email marketing; methods of attracting others’ attention; rates of people checking emails; how to avoid pet peeves in your next email promotion campaign. Each article talks about the core issue of getting customers actually to open and read the emails, and ideally have a purchase conversion rate, and not have the sent ad emails be ignored
Therefore, I rechecked my promotion box and try to convert myself into an ideal target group of people who would open emails, to see if they do work on me.
But no, sadly, I can not even finish the first step — read. I can tell that all companies put a lot of effort to make the promotions read easy and fun, like making some cute and colorful gifs or extremely brief sentences to inform customers of their updates in one second.
However, there are too many kinds of events: seasonal updates, discount campaigns, product promotions, cart emptying alerts… I can’t be the most ideal customer for every advertising email. Even if I am a loyal customer of a brand, I have to constantly read messages that are not useful to me. Furthermore, brands can’t push what they want based on my online habits because my needs are dynamic and constantly changing. I want to buy discounted products at this time, but maybe I want notification of the new seasonal clothes sometime later. In this predicament, the most significant feeling I get from receiving so many useless messages is that reading advertising emails is futile and a waste of time.
There is no denying that mailboxes are an essential market nowadays, as every brand is very concerned. Yet the ideal email conversion rate for almost every brand is below 20% and, in some cases, below 5%. There are more options available in such a situation, such as using your social media and official website as a platform to integrate information. When I need it, I go back to find the information I want. Or have the option to choose the frequency and type of information updates, and get the information I want for me. And most importantly, in today’s evolving email marketing world, an email can give me the most intuitive updates, but it can’t give me comprehensive information. I still need to do a lot of homework to determine whether I want to buy the product or not, and emails have become very difficult to generate stimulating consumption.
Of course, another way to look at this problem is perhaps the mailbox could just come up with a feature where each brand’s ad push is categorized separately in that brand’s folder.
All I want is my mailbox will not explode anymore and can have a simple button to delete all useless advertisements emails.
