First Step Marketing

Let’s start with the types of e-mail received. It shows that, on average, a staggering 361 e-mails per week were received, of which 70 per cent were Spam. There were relatively few permission-based e-mails, but these were competing with work e-mails and friends’ and colleagues’ e-mails. These were only averages, so for professional business people, many more e-mails will be received weekly. It’s a wonder e-mail open and clickthrough rates are as high as they are!

We also need to consider the time taken to process all these different types of e-mail. Grant Thornton (2005) showed the challenge of using e-mail to communicate with business owners. Overall, the average amount of time spent accessing and responding to e-mails in the UK is 1 hour and 12 minutes, compared to 1 hour and 30 minutes globally. However, these are averages, with 14 per cent of business owners spending 3-5 hours a day accessing and responding to e-mail, and 2 per cent using e-mail for more than 5 hours a day!

With this volume of e-mail, I think we are becoming more structured in how we approach it. Our options are essentially to:

• delete it
• read it to inform or entertain
• act on it, to find out more or buy
• archive it.

In a business context, you may prefer the ‘4 Ds’ model of efficient e-mail processing (McGhee, 2005), which recommends that we should, in order:

1. Delete it! (or ignore it, mark it as ‘read’)
2. Do it! (if it takes less than two minutes)
3. Delegate it! (if you can’t delete it or do it in two minutes)
4. Defer it! (if you can’t delete it, do it or delegate it).

Using this approach, McGhee recommends that we spend just an hour a day processing e-mails, and in this time it should be possible to process 50-100 messages. The implication for the e-mail marketer is that with the increasing volume of e-mail, we will spend less and less time with each mail. Note that the first thing we do in either case above is delete it!

Different e-mail processing behaviour is evident from these posts to the BBC web site. Think about how your e-mail design could be changed to accommodate these, or maybe whether you could process your e-mail more efficiently. Here are some e-mail management habits, characteristic of processing e-mail at work:

I work on many projects at once. Each e-mail that is project-related has the project code in the header. I have a folder for each job number that I’m working on, as well as folders for general admin, personal, humour etc. When I’m very busy, e-mails just get dragged unread to the appropriate folder. Then at some point during the day I will make time to read all e-mails related to each subject.

I basically scan through the sender and subject information, if I don’t recognise either then I delete it without thinking. I just don’t have the time to read all the spam offering me low rate mortgages or Viagra online!

I receive approximately two to three hundred e-mails a day. I cannot expect to read every one I receive, so I will read what I can when I have the time to do so, the rest I will never read. Any urgent matter should be dealt with in the traditional method - the telephone!

I only read e-mail twice a day. Once at the start of the day, once at the end. Anything else more urgent can be dealt with in person or by phone.

It can be seen that there are different types of behaviour:

• `Categorizers’ will put items in folders to be dealt with later
• `Deleters’ ruthlessly delete e-mail if the subject line suggests no relevance to their work
• ‘Scanners’ skim most e-mails for relevance
• ‘Readers’ carefully read most e-mails, since they don’t want to miss out on some information.

Clearly, the behaviours will vary according to the volume of e-mail received, how busy recipients are, and the type of e-mail — i.e. their interest in it.

Here we will look at how to develop e-mail creative that maximizes the likelihood for action. We will focus on promotional e-mails to achieve action. Most of the observations tend to apply specifically to promotional campaigns rather than e-newsletters, which have their own structure and copy.

Recipients may well delete many messages after evaluating them for just seconds, so competition for the recipients’ time is fiercer and we have limited means at our disposal to get our message across. What can we offer that will avoid our e-mail being ruthlessly deleted? Perhaps the reader will get no further than the first word of the subject line, or than the From address, which they will see first as they scan from left to right.

Of course, today, the majority of e-mail readers prefer to use a preview pane to view e-mails. Here, the recipient will make a decision according to the combination of text plus graphics if it is a HTML e-mail, so we have more scope to achieve a favourable outcome.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Understanding Consumers’ Email Behavior

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Business Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.