It’s the holidays and I’m hearing examples from all around the world of companies raising their email marketing programmes to fever pitch in an effort to squeeze as much as possible out of their customers. In many ways it seems like a no-brainer: it's easy to send more emails, we know these are people who have bought from us previously, and we’ve got plenty of stock to shift with attractive discounts, so what harm can it possibly do?

Malcolm Gladwell has coined (or appropriated) the term 'The Tipping Point' to talk about what happens when enough people start to be attracted to something so that it suddenly takes off. I’d like to propose the concept of 'POP' to describe the point at which people start to be turned off an idea or brand (you can work out the acronym). 

I think there is probably a curve to describe this. If you don’t engage with customers enough (through all media) then they don’t know who you are and their propensity to respond to your message is low.

In the middle of the graph is an optimum point where the customer starts to enjoy getting your mail, sees what you’re sending them as good customer service, and misses the email when it’s not there.

The trouble is that on the other side of the curve the customer starts to resent the fact that you’re mailing them. Perhaps they’re just mildly upset to begin with, and they just delete your email - but as the curve progresses and they get more email, the customer gets increasingly annoyed.

The important thing though is that I don’t believe the customer unsubscribes or reports the message as spam until well towards the bottom of the curve.

The Email Curve and The Disappointment Gap

So in the middle, between the point of maximum engagement and the point at which someone unsubscribes, is a big gap – I like to think of it as the 'disappointment gap'. During this period, every email that the customer receives is actually damaging the brand in the customer’s eyes. The trouble is that this damage is often invisible to the mailer. The customer doesn’t tell you anything, but I believe they frequently tell other people instead, thus spreading the damage even further – often to precisely the people who might otherwise be good prospective customers.

So what’s the right number of messages to be sending then? The difficulty is that the POP curve I described is different for every recipient – and, more to the point, it changes over time according to a host of other factors such as how much other mail they’ve been getting and so on.

Because of the length of the downward curve during which the customer becomes less and less responsive to email, it’s also pretty hard to distinguish between a recipient who is becoming annoyed by email, and one who is simply not in the market to buy anything from you at the moment but still wants to receive your emails.

So, what can we do about it?

• Set up separate segments of your list and do a long-term test by sending lots of mail to one segment and much less mail to the control group. This would need to be done over a long period of time, but it would show the different ROI on the two strategies.
• Allow your recipients to change their preferences rather than unsubscribe – and provide a preference option for them to receive less email.

But the simplest thing is simply to hold your nerve and not get tempted into sending more mail simply because you can. As the recession bites we’ll see more and more retailers who crack under pressure and start to increase their mailing volume. My hunch is that we’ll see more and more retailers who go out of business – and I can’t help feeling that there will be a connection between them.

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About the Author

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris. UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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