Most marketers have a basic understanding of email engagement. High open and click rates are good, low open and click rates are bad. Good engagent means we have a chance for our subscribers and audience to move down the funnel or to buy more of our products.
But engagement needs to be thought of as more than how successful we are at the perceived machine that is inputting emails and outputting more sales.
We’re all familiar with Aesop’s Fable about The Boy Who Cried Wolf – a short story to teach the lesson that if you raise false alarms and lie, it’ll lead to no one taking you seriously. When you run email marketing campaigns and workflows, it’s a story worth keeping in mind.
Consider the perspective of one of your subscribers as a parallel to the townspeople in Aesop’s Fable. If you continuously go to your subscribers with email content that isn’t interesting, doesn’t fit where they are in their own customer journey, or are offers sold as ‘strong’ which in their eyes become perceived as weak, what happens to those subscribers perception of your emails and your brand?
Imagine them receiving an email for “Tips on Getting started with Platform X”, after they’ve already completed the onboarding process.
or
A man receiving a ‘Year End Clearance Sale’ email, but the sale is for women’s apparel only.
While in this case you’re not explicitly lying to your subscribers like The Boy does, you are still turning them off from being engaged, or even just curious, about the emails that hit their inbox from you in the future. And the more that you continue to cry wolf to these subscribers, the less likely they are to engage when you really do have a strong promotion or new, relevant feature release to share with them.
Further, email providers like Gmail are taking this engagement into heavy consideration for their own inbox placement algorithms for their users. If you send email to 1000’s of Gmail users who do not engage with them, Gmail itself will be less likely to put your emails in front of other Gmail users based on that lack of engagement.
So the next time you’re scheduling an email to the bulk of your subscribers and you’re rationalizing sending it to a broad audience with the thought of “you never know, they might buy it”, weigh the consequences of doing so.