You’re probably on more than one company’s email list and you have no doubt felt that the majority of emails that flood your inbox are poorly targeted. If you keep receiving irrelevant marketing messages from a company you will hopefully unsubscribe from that list. Conversely if you receive highly targeted messages from a particular sender you will likely pay more attention to those messages.Most Internet businesses use an autoresponder service to manage customers and send out mass emails. The problem with this approach is that an autoresponder list is too course of a segmentation. The one thing all the people on the list has in common is that they at one point in time entered their name and email address on the same sign-up page, or they purchased the same product. Since that initial event a lot of things have probably occurred. For example, some of the prospects may have purchased the product that the autoresponder sequence was selling, others have purchased a competing product and are no longer potential buyers. But they all keep receiving the same marketing messages.
This is a terrible waste of attention. And if the business has a different product they’d like to sell to the people on the list they first have to overcome the bad-will generated by the poorly targeted messages they have inflicted on their list subscribers.
One possible solution to this problem is to use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that tracks all interactions with a prospect or customer. The CRM system knows all products a customer has purchased, all emails that have been sent to the customer and which of those were opened and in which of those the customer clicked on a link. With all this information you can filter out messages that try to sell a product the customer has already purchased, filter out messages on subjects the customer is clearly not interested in, etc. The remaining messages will be better targeted and will receive the attention they deserve.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rich Schefren used a CRM system (in this case Infusion) for the launch of The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2.
Where are you on the scale of customer communications: Using Outlook to send all outbound emails, Using an autoresponder service, Using a CRM system?
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