Most of us have experienced it. We buy something online, register for an event or download a document, and before long we start receiving emails from an organisation we barely remember interacting with.
For organisations, email marketing remains an attractive way to communicate with customers. It's relatively inexpensive, easy to automate and provides plenty of opportunities to measure engagement. With increasingly sophisticated marketing platforms, organisations can also personalise messages, track interactions and use information about customers to decide what communications to send and when.
There is often a misconception that having someone's contact details provides an organisation an ongoing invitation to contact them. This is where privacy and anti-spam legislation intersect, although they approach the issue from slightly different perspectives.
Privacy is concerned with how organisations collect and use information about people. Anti-spam legislation is more specifically concerned with the commercial electronic messages those organisations send. In New Zealand, these issues are addressed through the Privacy Act 2020 and the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. Equally Australia has its Privacy Act 1988 and Spam Act 2003.
The legislation is different in each country, but the underlying issue is much the same. People should have some control over how their information is used and whether organisations can continue contacting them.
While an unwanted marketing email might seem relatively harmless compared with a data breach or identity theft, the cumulative effect of these interactions shouldn't be underestimated.
People increasingly have to provide personal information simply to participate in everyday activities such as buying a ticket, accessing a service, making an enquiry or joining a loyalty programme where the details provided are usually given for a particular reason. However, organisations can be tempted to see the provision of this information as an opportunity to establish an ongoing marketing relationship. The customer may see things rather differently.
Providing an email address to receive a receipt isn't necessarily an expression of interest in a weekly newsletter. Registering for a webinar doesn't mean someone wants to hear about every other service the organisation offers. Equally making a single purchase doesn't automatically create a relationship that justifies years of promotional messages.
There are of course situations where people genuinely want to receive marketing. A well-timed message about a relevant product, a useful update or an invitation to something of interest can be welcomed.
The challenge is that organisations often measure the success of their marketing by how many people they can reach, rather than how many people actually want to hear from them. This can create some perverse incentives. Marketing databases become assets to be grown. Customer interactions become opportunities to capture additional contact details. And the ability to segment, profile and target people becomes increasingly valuable. The recent advances in technologies make all of this easier. It also makes it easier to lose sight of the person at the other end of the marketing message.
A customer who has purchased a product might subsequently receive reminders, recommendations, special offers and invitations to complete surveys. Their browsing behaviour may influence what they are sent, while their engagement with previous emails determines how frequently they are contacted. From the organisation's perspective, this can look like a sophisticated and personalised customer experience. From the customer's perspective, it can feel like being followed around by a business they bought something from six months ago.
There is also something slightly contradictory about the way organisations sometimes treat unsubscribe requests. It is recognised that people should be able to stop receiving marketing messages, yet some organisations still make the process unnecessarily difficult. Preferences are spread across different systems, people are asked to confirm decisions they have already made, or they discover that unsubscribing from one type of communication doesn't stop another.
An unsubscribe request should be a fairly clear indication that someone no longer wants a particular type of contact. It shouldn't be treated as an invitation to find another way to reach them.
This is particularly relevant for organisations operating in both New Zealand and Australia. While the details of the privacy and anti-spam frameworks differ, the underlying expectations around transparency, choice and respecting people's preferences are closely connected.
Marketing is ultimately about relationships. There is little value in having an extensive customer database if the people in it regard communications from the organisation as something to be ignored, deleted or blocked. Perhaps we should be thinking less about the size of our mailing lists and more about the quality of the relationships they represent. That might mean collecting fewer email addresses, being more selective about the messages we send and making it genuinely easy for people to decide what they want to receive. It might also mean accepting that someone can be a perfectly good customer without wanting an ongoing conversation with the organisation.
Privacy and anti-spam legislation provide useful frameworks for thinking about these issues, but the bigger question is about how organisations choose to treat people.
An email address is personal information. It is also a way of reaching directly into someone's day, competing for their attention and asking them to engage with something they may not have requested. Just because someone has given you their email address doesn't mean they've invited you to keep using it.