A few years ago I was a member of a business improvement organisation called the Entrepreneurs Circle whose founder, Nigel Botterill along with his team, would dispense all manner of marketing and business advice. For the five years that I was a member I learned a great deal and at the time it provided my magic business with a much needed boost in energy and knowledge.
One of the things that we were taught was the necessity, in their opinion, to keep in regular contact with our customers. If you had something you needed to tell them or that you wanted to sell them, one of the ways was to systematically send promotional emails. Not just one or two, but a scheduled ongoing series of them.
The theory was that since customers often needed to hear information many times before they would act, the only way to bring in the business was to effectively bombard them with emails until they relented!
I have to admit I could never bring myself to agree with this approach. Based on my own personal experience of being on the other end of this avalanche of emails, I know that even when I am sympathetic to the sender, or indeed have made purchases in the past from him, I don’t like constantly receiving contact from that business.
In fact, rather than encourage me to make a purchase, I am more likely to get irritated and set up the emails to go straight to my Junk folder so I don’t have to deal with them! It’s too much, too often.
Now it may be that I am out of step with modern practices, but I still feel that a consistent yet measured schedule of contacts is preferable to a seemingly never ending torrent of them. This is why my E-Club newsletters are only issued once a month, and why E-Club Pro members only receive one additional email with a specific video link a month too. And you have to be signed up to get them, of course.
But what is your take on this? Do you like to receive marketing emails from magic dealers virtually every day? Or would you prefer that the contact with you was more occasional?
I suppose we all have different tolerance thresholds with these things, and it probably also depends on exactly who is doing the contacting and exactly what form that contact takes. It may be that there are some dealers who you especially like and you welcome hearing from them five times a week.
But what if you don’t? Does the magic dealer actually alienate a proportion of its customers by pushing too hard? I would suggest that there is certainly a strong danger of this.
Of course during the last year when most of the time many of us have been trapped at home, it may be that high levels of publicity from magic suppliers has been a welcome distraction. But under normal circumstances, when we are all busy and have little free space in our day to play with, the temptation to simply delete the emails in order to not have to ‘cope’ with them is sometimes hard to resist.
We can all only take in a finite amount of information, and if an overload occurs, it’s almost bound to be counter-productive.