Relevant e-mails avoid mental opt-out

Mental opt-out has been a hot topic around here lately.  With e-mail dominating business communication, many marketers have fallen into the trap of classifying email as a free marketing tool, leading them to contact their customers without giving proper thought to email frequency or relevancy.  Since there’s no financial investment in e-mail, what is there to lose?  As it turns out, the answer is a lot.  As my colleague Patrick Surry discusses in a previous post, overusing the email channel can have detrimental effects on long-term customer value.  And, as mentioned by David Newbury in last month’s post, email overuse is a common cause for costly mental opt-out.

I recently submitted an op-ed to DM News reminding marketers about the issue of mental opt-out.  The piece received some positive feedback from industry peers, including Bonnier, a Portrait customer, who requested to reprint it in their company newsletter.  Many marketers fail to consider mental opt-out, but when you think about how many people have physically opted out of your emails, remember that just as many, if not more, could have mentally opted out. 

Read the whole piece here