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Marketing can be tricky, and email marketing can be even trickier. Obviously businesses that communicate with their customers do better than businesses that don’t, but reminders can quickly turn to pestering. What’s the line for email? What’s the line if you send email and phone your customers? In their paper Enough is Enough! The Fine Line is Executing Multichannel Relational Communication, Dr. Andrea Godfrey, Dr. Kathleen Seiders and Dr. Glenn B. Voss decided to get to the bottom of this particular marketing puzzle.

The basic premise was this: compelling, personal communications encourage customer loyalty and build long-term relationships. But at what point do communications drive customers away? Reactance theory suggests that increasing relational communication (a fancy name for targeted materials like emails, phone calls and direct mail) can have “a negative influence on repurchase because customers perceive the communication as invasive or obtrusive.”

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“We cannot solve the significant problems we face today at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them…” Albert Einstein

When I was a kid I couldn’t stop reading comic books.  I loved superhero adventures.  When DC and Marvel comics came to life and started appearing in theaters with advanced storylines and special effects I was once again captivated.   Certain to thrill, I anxiously made my way to the theater.   The one that stuck with me the most, with similarities to the emergence of Social Media in business and life, was Iron Man.

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Every business in the world right now is trying to tap into the power of the collective voice of social media. The problem is in order to do that, businesses are first, sending their customers away, and then yelling to try and get them back. How is this a good system?!

Every time someone thinks they’re being a savvy marketer, and puts one of those ‘Follow me on Twitter’ or ‘Check out our Facebook page’ buttons on a website, what they’re doing is telling customers to leave their space – where they control the message – and go into the world of social media.  What are those customers going to do when they get onto Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn? Are they going to remember the message, or will they find a million reasons to be distracted?

These customers are going to do the exact same thing you do when you hop onto a social network – check your messages, catch up on gossip and comment on the latest episode of Game of Thrones… If you go to a social media site, you’ve done more than left a website; you’ve left the marketing message behind. This is not great relationship building. Clicking a ‘Like’ button may mean you get a fan, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting engagement! Marketing like this will not create a valuable customer relationship.

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Marketing shouldn’t be a verb.  I firmly believe that marketing isn’t something you do to someone, it should be a conversation. I’m not the only one who’s convinced marketing needs to be better, and that’s why you hear so many experts today talking about Conversation Marketing.

The market today is basically a bazaar.  Everyone’s mingling and everyone’s stuff is on display - view any global village market and it’s pretty easy to see the similarity between the internet and a busy street in Dhaka.

The problem with the ‘bazaar’ state of the market is that everybody is yelling. You’ll soon discover what the caliber of the conversation is when you see a business trying to join the market.   Businesses are yelling at potential customers “buy ours, buy ours, no, don’t buy theirs, buy ours!!” and yelling at other businesses, “mine’s better! No my product is better! We have a testimonial!” Blah blah blah.

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The internet is obsessed with bacon. In about 15 minutes of research (delicious, mouth-watering research) I found recipes for Bacon Cupcakes, Bacon Salt Caramels and even Bacon Jam! Unfortunately, just as Spam became SPAM when the word came to refer to unsolicited email, bacon is transforming into BACON: unwanted, but legitimate email, sent by legitimate senders. Do you have a BACON problem?

Think about your inbox. How many mailing lists are you on? Every day you probably see deals, updates, newsletters and coupons from a huge variety of businesses: Amazon, Chapters, Godiva, The Gap, Atlus, Groupon, Expedia, Apple, Sephora, American Apparel… and those are just the ones that just pop up in my inbox that I can think of off the top of my head. You could probably add 10 more without trying.

The popularity of BACON is staggering. You might even get more BACON than you do actual email, considering over 27 billion BACON emails were sent last year - that’s 4 emails every day for every person on the planet! We know BACON has grown almost exponentially, but why?

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