There have been instances where people have spent more time going through their mailboxes looking for a particular email than actually reading one. While it doesn’t make much of a difference for personal accounts, it can be a major productivity barrier at the workplace. But what really causes this issue?

Unwanted Mail: At some point of time, all of us have had to deal with maiils from unknown/unwanted senders. However, people often think that the easiest way to deal with such a problem is to curse a bit, ignore it and in most cases, delete these emails. This is as effective as killing 1 Mr.Anderson (remember from The Matrix). Over a period of time, you’re bound to receive thousands such emails which not only adds the tedious task of deleting them but also clutters mailboxes thus making it supremely difficult for you to search for relevant mails.

The easiest solutions to this problem:

1. Delete your email account – Well, that’s not really an option for most of us except the “Monk who sold his Ferrari“.

2. Unsubscribe - More than 95% of mails from unknown/unwanted recipients have an ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the mail. It takes just one click on such a link to get your email address removed from the subscription list thus avoiding any mail from the same sender in the future.

3. ‘Report Spam‘ – All email service providers(at least the one’s that the cool people use)offer an option to mark a particular email/sender as Spam. This ensures that any more emails from the same sender will automatically be moved to the ‘Spam’ folder.

While performing an action for every unwanted mail seems tedious, it seems to be the most effective method to keep your inbox clutter free. This is something that needs to be done at the user’s end, but, there is something that email marketeers can do to make the receipients life a little easier.

Just the other day at Smursh we were discussing some bits about an email campaign that we ran recently. It was a highly successful one wherein the number of mails opened, number of links clicked and even the number of links at the end of the mail clicked exceeded the industry average by a huge margin. The last stat being the most important which indicates that people read through the entire email before acutally clicking on links provided at the end of the mail! To top it all, only 4 of the over 550 people that the mail went to, chose to unsubscribe!

How did we achieve this? To start with, we went on to talk about these steps that people take to avoid spam and how we as email marketers should deal with it.

Our initial goal was to not be or come across as spammers, but it went beyond that.

We concluded that the best way to make sure our mails are not unwanted is to add value to them and make them wanted. We have to make sure that people look forward to the mails we send out. And that actually sums up our efforts in all the campaigns we run. We don’t want to make people cringe when they see our mail, and that includes everything from your subject, to your design and finally, to your copy.

Now to take this idea and develop it further!

It is relative to:

• The brand”s objective
• The customer”s want
• The time at which the above two meet

Digital media scores over traditional media because it brings the factor of time rightly into the limelight. It can connect the consumer and the brand when both are in a position to engage. It is the difference between selling insurance outside a cinema hall and selling it at the client”s house on a weekend.

The customer might want it, and the product might sell itself as well, but they need to connect at the right time. The web and the mobile enable this very well. Search marketing for instance is the best example of time based marketing.

How to put time into advertising?

Analyse what information people are seeking, contrive your information according to the speed with which they require the information, and thirdly open avenues for longer interactions later.

Here is an example:

I am looking for the share price of Smursh (whenever it will get listed). I don”t want to know about how a broker’s demat account is practically free (at that moment of time at least), what I need is the share price so just give me a share price. Instead, pitch me an avenue I can use or come to directly the next time I want such an info – SMS update for instance, a Facebook Fanpage or even a website.

Ask him to connect on Facebook or a forum you have to discuss shares and stocks and on those platforms sell your product benefits.

Appreciate a person’t time and he will appreciate you.