A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problem with PR email, the results of a survey on people’s attitudes to the email that PR agencies and others send them.
The survey paints a dismal picture of how email is used in the PR business.
Now, here comes an equally bleak picture on what marketers do with email about their brands according to e-Orchard, a survey by London creative agency Stephens Francis Whitson.
[…] The report claims to have uncovered evidence of brand owners bombarding customers with irrelevant, mistimed and inappropriate emails.
It splits the brands into ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’, with the likes of Mini, BA and Ocado showing how it should be done.
While economic pressures are driving more brands online, many of the companies in the survey "are sending out blanket email campaigns simply because it is cheap to do so," the report claims.
The e-Orchard survey covers companies operating across a range of sectors such as retail, financial services, FMCG, travel, entertainment and leisure and argues that some brands surveyed showed:
- Scant evidence of differentiated communications depending on customer knowledge, behaviour or value
- Poor co-ordination of on and offline communications
- Dangerously high frequency of highly repetitive, hard sell messages
- Brands stuck on transmit: little attempt to engage in any genuine dialogue with customers
- Rare examples of genuinely clever, creative, smart brand and commercial thinking
This looks like a worse picture than that suggested by the PR email survey.
Small comfort for anyone.
[Photo by cole007, used under Creative Commons license.]
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This articulates what I’ve been thinking for some time. I could add greatly to the list of sinners who email me day in day out at work with variations on the same stuff. It is so the antithesis of engaging me. I will read your reports with interest. Thanks