How Not To Trigger That "Spam" Emotional Response

Ever had that one annoying email sender you can’t seem to
get rid of in your Other or Promotions tab? No point to this
question – yes, you did.

We’ve all reached saturation levels, we’re all at
that point where creating a new email address appears to be a better idea than hitting
delete on 20+ emails each morning… and then again, each midday…

Sure, you can always unsubscribe. That’s a given and
luckily, it’s the law. You’ll always have the right to be forgotten and
removed from all communication lists.

But is this honestly the best solution we can hope to have?

That’s unlikely, considering that often, it’s not all
emails and all content you’d like to opt-out from.

Yet, the sender may not split them up by subscription
types, altogether not using any Preference Centre. Perhaps you still
find the majority of the content you receive valuable, but you’re just
overloaded by too many emails from them.

Maybe you’d like their content to be different – better yet,
grouped differently. More custom-tailored to your preferences.

Perhaps you lack the opportunity to “speak up”, to offer
feedback, to help that sender help you come into contact with the most relevant
content. And just when you need it, too.

Sometimes, it’s just that hitting delete takes less time
than unsubscribing and you honestly don’t have the time to do so every day.

For marketers, the frustration even adds up, creating a
whole other spectrum of self-doubt:

Are my emails facing the same fate? Are my efforts
met with the same reaction? Am I also… “that guy”?

For this reason, we put together the best of our marketing
automation expertise, in hope of leading to a solution that’s much better for
us all – to help each of us avoid being “that guy” and create an email
marketing ecosystem we all thrive in, benefit from.

Read along to find best practices in both marketing
automation platform management and email marketing content use,
ones that could help us add value through personalized content delivered
to our inboxes when we need it most. All while avoiding the draining clutter
we’ve all come to dread.

On the marketing automation platform administration side,
there is a handful of options, programs, settings, and functionalities we can
leverage to adjust our email communication.

For starters, consider keeping an eye on your
best-performing Email Timing. If you already have sent several emails to
your audiences, on multiple days and at multiple times, reports you can draw up
from your platform can easily answer the most valuable questions. Which
emails were most engaging? At what time were they sent? On which
days of the week? Are there drastic differences across the results?

Simply by analyzing the data you already have at hand you
can make well-informed decisions regarding your <a href="https://expertise.logarithmicsolutions.com/eloqua-enhanced-deliverability-report">best-performing email timings
for each particular segment</a>. And so, you can adjust communication
accordingly, to cater to your own audiences’ preferences.

Of equal importance, monitoring your <a href="https://www.logarithmicsolutions.com/hitting-the-right-email-frequency" target="_blank">email frequency</a>
and implementing a program that prevents too many emails from being sent to the
same contact are vital email marketing management components.

When sending email communication at a large scale, you
probably have multiple contacts engaged with different content tracks,
at varying stages of the customer journey. These users are ultimately
members of various subscription types and campaigns, all at the same time.

Adopting a <a href="https://expertise.logarithmicsolutions.com/eloqua-implementation-success-story">Touch Governance program</a> to act as a
decisional layer in your campaigns is wise if you don’t want a contact being oversaturated
with emails from you. This type of program can override campaign audience
membership rules to limit the maximum allowed number of memberships.

For instance, let’s say you decide that being a part of two
campaigns at once is just the right frequency for your audiences. The Touch
Governance program, once added to each new campaign canvas, will firstly check
the number of active memberships.

If this already is 2, the program places sends on hold,
periodically checking whether any of the previous campaigns have ended, so that
the most recent one can begin sending.

Deciding on the most appropriate Email Frequency for your
target, assessing unique touchpoints per campaign, and then designing a Touch
Governance program that enforces strict rules for maintaining your desired
email frequency is a recipe for success.

In contrast, you run the risk of oversaturating your
audiences to the point that they consider you “spammy” and not only might
valuable content get lost, but your brand might also lose trust.

Valuable add-ons for most marketing automation platforms, Contact
Fatigue Management tools allow you to assess your reachable database by
saturation levels.

While this might sound obvious, each of your contacts is
different and should definitely not be treated the same. With advanced
intelligence solutions, fatigue analyses look at each particular contact,
analyzing the number of emails sent to them and their engagement over time.

It ultimately assigns a corresponding level of fatigue
to them (undersaturated, just right, saturated, or oversaturated).

What this means for marketers is new doors being opened for <a href="https://www.logarithmicsolutions.com/hitting-the-right-email-frequency/" target="_blank">email
frequency personalization</a> and custom-tailoring. Your undersaturated
contacts have room for more communication, while those with exceeding
saturation thresholds are at risk of email burnout and disengagement.

The great news is that you, as a marketer, don’t lift a
finger to assess this. It’s all scored automatically, giving you the option to
create new segments, add custom filters and routing rules to your marketing
workflows, and adjust your communication to reflect real-time consumption
preferences.

We have to repeat this; “real-time consumption preferences”.

Who is your most realistic and accurate source of user
preferences if not your users themselves? Offering your audience the chance
to choose what type of content they prefer to receive from you is without a
shred of doubt essential.

Consider creating a custom email communication <a href="https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/marketing/eloqua-user/Help/SecurityOverview/EmailSubscriptionMgmt.htm" target="_blank">Preference
Centre</a>. This happens through a landing page and a form, grouping various
email communication campaigns by types and topics.

This way, should your users decide to opt-out of communication
for a specific campaign alone, they can easily do so without globally
unsubscribing to all your communication. The more in-depth you go with grouping,
the better accuracy – just keep in mind that you also might not want to offer
so many options that you trigger a customer confusion moment.

Ultimately, a Preference Centre gives your contacts the
freedom to speak up and tell you what content is most valuable for them. If
you allow them to choose themselves, they will be most satisfied with what type
of communication gets sent to them, following the most realistic source of
truth.

Luckily for us marketers, aside from several MarTech platform
admin approaches that can be considered when personalizing to delight
audiences, many content-related aspects also factor in. These leverage
programs, setups, and data collection or reporting practices to enhance custom-tailoring.

In today’s digital world context, obtaining a clear,
accurate picture of consumer desires no longer represents a difficult
endeavor.

Considering the almost insanely huge amounts of data and
data analysis mechanisms marketers have at hand, data collection and
processing have advanced so much that companies can draw up truly realistic, 360-degree
portrayals of customer preferences.

What is perhaps rather tricky still, is what can be done
with this information; more specifically, how to best use it to achieve
specific desired outcomes. (And honoring privacy, of course, but that’s
a whole other topic.)

When we return to the idea of personalizing emails to
delight audiences, to accurately match expectations, <a href="https://www.logarithmicsolutions.com/data-normalization-challenges-in-eloqua-platform-administration/" target="_blank">data management practices</a>
are a true differentiator.

This stretches from the definition of requirements for data
that needs to be gathered to processes in place for its collection, to its
storage and the actual analysis, to ultimately valuing applicability and leveraging
outcomes accordingly.

Collect – store – process – analyze – use. We
probably all have more information at hand than we even realize, and that’s why
we can’t stress the last factor enough. Capitalize on all this information to
add personalized content to your emails, sent to specific audiences based on
their own interests.

Adjusting your email communication to cater to individual
preferences is no piece of cake, but it also doesn’t need to be too
complicated.

A <a href="https://www.logarithmicsolutions.com/8-reasons-why-enterprises-choose-eloqua-marketing-automation/" target="_blank">powerful marketing automation platform</a> (such as
Oracle Eloqua) allows you to add Dynamic Content to your emails, to send specific
segments the right content for their needs.

Actively listening and collecting as much information
as possible from your contacts aids you to define very narrow segments which in
turn can be presented with extremely custom-tailored information that goes way
beyond simply sending content based on the buyer journey stage, for example.

Think of it in the most basic way and then extrapolate; if
you know contact X has attended a certain webinar last week, on topic Y, and
also viewed a few key pages on that same topic in the past, you wouldn’t want
to contact them with information of a whole other nature, right?

But what if they are in the same stage of your journey as
contact Z, who attended a webinar for topic T? What if the two leads are
exactly alike from almost all points of view, except for their topic of
interest? Would you consider sending two separate,
very-similar-yet-slightly-different email campaigns? Maybe. But what happens
when there are 5,000 similar leads? 

Dynamic Content happens, if you want to follow best practices,
execute your campaigns as efficiently as possible, and hope to generate great
success. You split your audiences by demonstrated interests, and you present
them with the information they really need at that specific point in time.

You show you understand them and you delight them.

Last but definitely not least, another factor worth
mentioning is providing users with the opportunity to speak up about
where a preference mismatch happened. When no other prior effort seems to have paid
off and contacts still unsubscribe from your communication, instead of simply
forgetting they were ever your contacts, you can use this “opportunity” to gather
feedback.

Of course, this won’t always work, and some users will never
have the time or willingness to provide too detailed feedback on the reasoning
behind their choice. But some will. And their feedback can be turned to gold
when carefully assessed using either out-of- or <a href="https://expertise.logarithmicsolutions.com/eloqua-reporting-success-story">outside-the-box
reporting solutions</a>.

Offer one last chance for your contacts to let you know why
they are unsubscribing, without pressuring them into changing their minds.
Simply take in the feedback, analyze it, and determine if you can (and should!)
apply any changes to your email communication content or frequency.

Dealing with the problem of emails that trigger a “spam”
emotional response goes way beyond globally unsubscribing, and we all need to
know that there are many better ways of handling this situation.

If we, as marketers, take a stand and start moving further
in the direction of a friendlier email marketing ecosystem, we can all benefit
from cleaner inboxes, more efficiency, and better content.

Have you decided to improve your email marketing campaigns?
Feel free to reach out to us to thoroughly discuss any and all custom-tailored
solutions we can devise.

Dealing with emails that trigger a “spam” emotional response goes beyond unsubscribing, and we all need to know that there are better ways to deal with this.