There’s something I hate about the fact that they charge for tampons and pads in bathrooms. I understand the financial outlay of providing a ‘service’ but at the same time, the collection method means that most of us never use them. After all, on those occasions when a woman needs a tampon or pad from those machines right bloody now, we probably don’t have our purses with us. Most women I know keep at least one in there for just such a moment, after all. If we don’t have our purses, guess what else we don’t have? A dime! In my experience, any time any woman has stared at that machine with a look of hopelessness and despair over their lack of a dime, another woman has brandished her personal emergency tampon and handed it over without a second thought.
So why do they charge? Well if they didn’t charge, then people would just take them and that would be a financial loss. I get that. Except, as my friend Mark Jaquith put it:
Financial outlay is an imprecise way of validating the intensity of a need.
The day I had my great-tampon-rant was the same day I’d argued with some folks about marketing. Someone who is a ‘known’ person in the WordPress community got a bog standard email from a hosting company. It was one of those emails that looked like it was meant to feel personal, but was really just a sales pitch about what the company was and how they worked.
The thing about that is I’m pretty damn sure the person who got the email knew all of that already. He may have known it better than the ‘person’ who sent the email. I say ‘person’ in quotes because I’m sure it was an automated campaign set to hit up people who’d emailed or used a contact form and asked a question.
And this bothered me.
If the email hadn’t made an attempt to be personal, and instead just said “Hey, you used our form/emailed our service address recently. Did you get all the help you needed? Do you need to talk?” I would have been just fine with it. And if he’d checked a box to say “Please contact me about stuff!” I’d similarly say “Well you deserved that one, B.”
The reality is that he filled in a form to get a ‘report’ that he wanted to read and got that personalized email within an hour. The company offered something for ‘free’ but the cost really was data collection. Furthermore, the penalization was immediate solicitation.
It doesn’t matter who the company is. This could be mine (it’s not) or yours (it might be). Pretty much every company known to humanity has done this at least once. And every company uses the justifications that the marketing strategy converts people into sales, and thus it’s fine. We all accept that marketing automation is hard, that identifying people we should be reaching out to and separating them from the ones who will just be annoyed by our hard sells is extremely difficult.
Remember what Mark said?
Financial outlay is an imprecise way of validating the intensity of a need.
Not enough women using the pay-for tampons and pads is (part of) why they’re never going to be free. Women don’t use them because they’re pay-for (and we rarely have the damned dime).
The ‘need’ of tampons is not being correctly measured.
With those marketing emails, I would say this:
Financial boons are an imprecise way of validating the effects of a campaign.
Yes, I’m aware I just said that “Making money doesn’t mean your campaign was successful.”
Except that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that the effects of your marketing are more than just financial. If you send out 1000 emails and get 1 sale, that sounds like ‘free money.’ Very little output and work nets you money. Everyone wants this. The problem is how many people did you chase away? What net negative are you creating? We’re not tracking the information in a way that lets us know this. We’re just thinking that any news, any discussion, and any income means it was good and effective.
Let me ask this differently. How many auto-play ads have you seen on a website that made you like a product less? How many websites have you quit visiting because you can’t stand their ad practices?
Not all press is good press. Forbes recently had a snafu where they asked you to turn off adblocking only to serve up ads with malware. They had a rather immediate and vocal negative impact. I doubt that level of embarrassment and pain will hit this company, but at the same time, we should be looking towards other, better ways of attracting new customers.
This Can Be Fixed
Looking at the situation that led to this in the first place, requiring an email to download a report is an obvious ploy to gain a list of people to contact. There was no attempt to opt in and no information that the email would be used for marketing. Step one is to disclose that. Step two is to actually make that opt-in. Step three is to provide some additional reward. “Do you like reports? Click here and we’ll send you our next one right away!” Then when you send those next reports, you can put a little footer for sales. “Interested in our stuff?”
Step four is the hardest. Curate the damned list. Remove all your customers. You already have their emails, you don’t need to email them about your services. Put them to the side. Next you want to remove people with emails like support or webmaster. In addition, you’ll want to check your list for people who already know about your product. WordPress is an incredibly small community. There are some people who just are not ever going to be your target audience, who aren’t going to need that sale, and you don’t need to bother them. They’re also the ones who will uncheck the marketing email, of course, but just in case…
Step five is handling your existing customers (the ones you removed in step four). Put them on separate list to target with different emails. “Hey, you’re already our customer and we noticed you liked X. Would you be interested in Y and Z?” Of course if your customers have checked that box to say “Don’t email me with marketing stuff” then you damn well better respect it.
For step six I want everyone to stop pretending these are personal emails. Shut up. Give up. We know, okay? We absolutely, 100%, without a doubt know that you automated this stuff. And that’s totally okay. But you cannot claim personal emails, from real people, while not vetting the people to whom you’re sending email in the first place. Okay? Good. Now go be quirky! “Hi Mika! I set up our robots to email people who downloaded X because I wanted to make sure they knew about Z and Y! Hate these emails? Click here and we’ll delete you from the database.”
But Can It Be Automated?
Not entirely. No. The real question is ‘Should it be automated?’
This goes back to Forbes. They automated their ads. They set it and let it run without review. Obviously the answer there is ‘No, that should not have been automated.’ It’s easier to ignore them and trust the ad company. That said, regularly I go through the ads on my site and delete them when I find them annoying or offensive. Yes, I curate my ads. And if someone tells me “Hey there was an ad for porn” I go look for it!
As much as we’d love to automate these things, we can’t. We just need a human taking a look now and then to go “Hang on…” Marketing cannot be set it and forget it. We have to look at the return on investment. We have to understand what impact, true impact, our campaigns have. We can’t just look at the net income, we have to be aware of the seemingly invisible loss.
And as for those tampons? We need a better metric than just “Well some people pay for them, but not enough to make us think a lot of women will use them if we give them away for free….” Maybe they could just have a nice box of tampons and pads in every stall, where you can press a lever and one item falls out every X minutes. Or maybe that idea of a drop of menstrual blood works in place of a dime… At any rate. The point is assuming things as successful because of a lack of response does not actually mean they are.
The circular arguments, that silence proves success, or at least an acceptable status quo, need to be thrown out on their ears.
Comments
3 responses to “Circular Arguments Need Research”
Just on a side note, did you know in some places of the world (e.g. mine) an opt-in procedure for commercial e-mail marketing campaigns is legally required? Companies doing it the way you’ve described above will literally get sued for contacting people without their explicit consent.
Now, passing legislation for every possible variation of corporate-to-human interaction surely isn’t desirable; but isn’t it worth a second thought that if companies had curated their lists better from the beginning on, legislation like that possibly hadn’t been issued in the first place?
Anyway, thanks for this great post, Mika, it’s a treasure!
@Caspar Hübinger: I often tell people that data collection via plugins is something that can turn into unforeseen legal issues outside the US (and regularly cite Germany and the Netherlands as places where opt-out policies are illegal). But no, no, people just want to collect your information and then do god knows what with it…
I’m not in marketing. But I am aware of the reasons why we do things. Get more customers. But are they they right customers? And are we losing the right ones because they don’t like these tactics?
I honestly don’t think I want the person who falls for those emails. They’re likely to be the guy who gets hacked later on.
@Caspar Hübinger: unfortunately, those sorts of laws are counterproductive, rarely used, and sometimes repealed. The basic principle here is: if I’m never actually in your country, then your laws mean nothing to me. The majority of the internet companies have no presence in such restrictive environments, and the reality of the global economy means that they don’t even need to. Not one of the laws passed in any EU countries affect me, for example, and even though I’m in no chance of violating them, they’re not part of any decision making process, at all. Even if I sold something globally (I don’t), those laws mean literally nothing to me. Totally irrelevant.
Local laws don’t work for a space where reach is global, regulations are nearly non-existent, and enforcement is as near to zero as possible. People do not care. That simple.