Relevant Content

A few days ago, while scrolling thru my RSS feeds, I came across the following header:

Ben & Jerry's Drops Email Marketing In Favor of Social Media

I had to read the article.

It appears that in the UK, Ben & Jerry has decided to drop their email marketing strategy. The article stated that customers “disliked the email despite loving the brand.” But, the author didn’t go deeper to try and find out WHY the newsletter was disliked.

Many social media experts have argued that traditional marketing is intrusive: your program is interrupted in order to bring you a commercial; or the magazine article you are reading is continued on a page following some advertisements.

The email newsletter, although not considered “traditional” marketing, could also be seen as intrusive or interruptive marketing. But, it still doesn’t make sense for a company to drop the entire email marketing campaign when all the quantifiable metrics still show it to be one of the most effective forms of communication marketing.

My question to Ben & Jerry’s is: why was the email newsletter disliked? Was it a technical issue? With more and more people checking their email on mobile devices, was the newsletter formatted for the proper delivery vehicle?

Was the issue content? What kind of information was being disseminated in the newsletter? Was it geographically important information, or was everyone in the B&J database getting the same information, regardless of where they lived? Were they offering “relevant content”, or were they just using the newsletter to keep their name/brand in front of customers?

I can’t answer the questions because I have never gotten one of their email newsletters. Right now, I wish I had...just to see why it was so disliked by customers who clearly love the brand. As of this writing, I have signed up to receive future ChunkMail…you can too. Just click here.

Regardless of the reason customers disliked the email, you shouldn’t just drop the campaign. You should work on integrating email and social marketing so they work in conjunction with each other and with traditional print marketing. According to Information Week, “Almost 40% of consumers consult Facebook and Twitter to complement the information, deals, and news they receive from companies via e-mail marketing…”

No matter the delivery vehicle of your message (social, email, or traditional marketing channels), the single most important component should be content.

Is your content relevant? Are you talking about noteworthy issues like new flavors or new sales promotions or new location openings? Or are you talking simply to hear yourself talk?

Gen-Y consumers like their content in 140 characters or less. As marketers, we need to be brief, concise and most important…relevant. Our customers will eventually stop listening to us, or (worse) listen to someone else, if we are providing information and content that is both useless and irrelevant.