Meryl's Notes Blog

You might allow some e-commerce sites to send you emails with sales and specials. I do. But some go overboard and give you no way to cut down the number of emails you receive. One such site sends emails more than once a week with a sale and instead of drawing me to the site to check out deals, I delete them.

The emails come too often and the sales are too general. In other words, too many choices! The company would have a better chance of my checking out sales by doing the following:

• Limit emails to no more than once a week.
• Limit sales items to a manageable number (hundreds is not manageable).

The point is to find the balance between overwhelming the user and enticing the user. I recommend these sites read The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.

An email newsletter is a great way to build relationships (for B2B businesses), get sales (for B2C businesses), and stay in the customers’ minds. But there’s such a thing as too much. B2Bs have to balance the number of promotional emails with informative emails. Too many promotional emails — readers will unsubscribe because it’s not worth being on a mailing list when there are far more promotions than good stuff they can use. 80/20 rule works here.