Avoiding Message Saturation
Guess does a good job of sending out well designed messages. We like them so much; we mentioned some of their tactics back in February.
The registration process to receive email from them is pretty painless and asks for basic information. First Name, Last Name, Email Address Zip Code and Gender are all required. The only optional field is Birthday. Of course I filled it out, in hopes of getting a present in September, who doesn’t love birthday presents? There is also an area to select my email preference, HTML, Plain Text, AOL or No Preference.
The last area of the registration, Shopping Preference, is also required. It contains four pre-checked boxes, for Guess Women, Guess Men, Guess Shoes and Guess Accessories. When I registered, I left all of the boxes checked, because I didn’t want to miss out on anything.
I have provided Guess with the information they asked for, and after several months, they have failed to utilize any of it.
Yesterday afternoon, I received two separate messages from Guess. The first message was about Summer’s Easiest Look for Guys. Cool – I agreed to receive messages about Men’s Clothing. I didn’t think anything of it.
Until five minutes later when I received the second message about Summer’s Ultimate Look, this message had a female model and links to the clothing she was wearing.
Five minutes…
With a little more attention to detail, Guess could have avoided over-messaging to their subscribers. Sending to segments based solely on shopping preferences (that were determined with pre-checked boxes) isn’t the best of plans if you are planning on sending to multiple segments on the same day. Consider sending one combined message. In this case sending out a Summer Style message with both Men,s and Women,s clothing might have been a better option. Hollister has had some compelling dual-purpose messaging in the past.
If that wasn’t an option, Guess could have segmented their list by gender. Sure, I am on both the Men’s and Women’s lists; however, by segmenting by gender, I would have only received one message.
If they just aren’t up to either of these suggestions, waiting more than five minutes, say at least a day, preferably two before sending the next message is a good way to stay in good graces subscribers if there is no other way around sending two messages.
Posted by MindComet on May. 16, 2007
