Stores 'bludgeon' their customers 'to death' with emails — and it's a horrible mistake

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Stores have a tendency to send too many emails to their customers, prioritizing short-term sales over long-term gain.
The real danger isn't customers who unsubscribe from email lists — it's disengaged customers who never open a single email and eventually can no longer receive them.
Retailers should better target their emails to customers, says James Glover, CEO of the email-marketing consultancy Coherent Path.

Online shoppers know: first comes ordering from an online store, then comes the relentless email marketing.

Those emails are important to retailers looking for their next customers, but only if they do it right. According to a recent study by email-marketing consultancy Coherent Path, most retailers aren't doing it correctly, and they could be losing potential sales and customers as a result.

Retailers have "choices to make" when interacting with customers, according to Coherent Path CEO James Glover.

"You can bludgeon them to death for a very exciting three or four weeks by sending them five emails a day," he said. "Or you can try to manage the diet that you're putting in front of them ... optimizing longer-term revenue."

The real danger, Glover says, isn't people actively unsubscribing from retailer's emails. Only a small amount of customers actually take pains to do that.

Instead, it's email that can't be delivered. If a retailer sends a customer marketing emails for a year, and the customer doesn't open a single one of them, the address is then registered by the customer's email provider as "undeliverable."

That means no emails can get through, and the customer is no longer reachable through email. The customer likely won't even notice it's happened, as the customer had been ignoring the email for an entire year.

Some retailers also run a high-risk strategy of sending three or more emails in one day, which — unless it's Black Friday — customers typically don't tolerate.

This is dangerous, as email marketing can lead to both direct and indirect sales. Direct sales are pretty straightforward: you open the link, then buy the item. Indirect sales happen when customers are clearly influenced by the email marketing but don't go through the email to purchase.

"Truly aggravating customers who might potentially be good customers even if they aren't buying through email," is a danger for retailers, Glover says.

Studies have shown that customers who get marketing emails purchase 68% more than customers who don't receive the emails — even if they don't interact with the emails at all.

Customers disengage for a variety of reasons, stemming from both frequency and content. One email a day, on average, is the norm for retailers today.

Much of this could be avoided if retailers looked at the content of their emails and better tailored it to customers. For example, Levi's sends different emails to customers who purchased from them in the last 45 days and those who didn't 90% of the time.

"There are folks out there that are doing a good job this stuff," Glover said.

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