The other day I received an email from an acquaintance with a subject line that indicated he was seeking some help. I was curious so I opened the email and I saw it was personalized to me and the message indicated he wanted to stay in touch and asked me to click a link. I checked the link without clicking it and saw it lead to his website, so I went there and what I saw was a signup form for his email newsletter. I closed the page, feeling that what I’d seen wasn’t a genuine attempt to reach out so much as an attempt to get me to sign up for his newsletter. And ironically if he’d just been direct he might have gotten my sign up, but instead what I saw was a message that was disingenuous and yet was designed with the hope that if people clicked on the link they’d feel compelled to sign up because of the offer they’d see on the website.
Marketing of any type can be tricky. You want your marketing to be effective, but you also don’t want to turn people off. It could be argued, with the example above, that this person already had my contact information, but the problem is did he have it from an existing e-newsletter or did he have it simply because we’d exchanged an email? And if he did have an existing e-newsletter, why not simply send an e-blast out and make sure people know that a change is coming? In this case an email was sent out to a list of people, but since I’d never gotten an e-newsletter from this person previously, it was clear to me that I’d been put into his system and then sent an email designed to get me to perform an action, based in part on the social behavior the email was trying to emulate.
If you want to personalize email sent to people do it with an objective that focuses on building trust and relationship first. Even the act of getting people to join a newsletter is an act of trust and relationship based on whether or not those people know you. And since a newsletter ideally helps you to continue to conversation, as well as possibly lead to business its important that how people come to it actually occurs in a manner that helps build trust. If trust isn’t built, what it creates instead is a feeling of being played. That may not be the intent of the person, but emails (or social media) that emulate social behavior to get specific actions to occur as opposed to developing a relationship create a false relationship.
If you want to use social behavior in your marketing, make sure you use it for the right reasons, and that you understand the potential consequences if people feel like they are being played. Social behavior in marketing should really be about building relationships and trust, before anything else. If you want someone to sign up for a newsletter or something else, just be direct. Don’t create an elaborate social behavior routine for the purposes of getting a sign-up, because such an elaborate routine isn’t genuine and creates a lack of trust. People know when they are appreciated as people as opposed to only being appreciated because of what they can give someone.
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