Before Your Business Sends a Happy New Year Email or SMS, Consider This Risk

For businesses around the world, finding reasons to engage with customers is an important part of their annual customer retention and sales plans.

The concept became very common around a decade ago as content marketing was growing as a field and businesses were beginning to understand that customers and prospects don’t like to always be sold-to, but also want to be entertained.

In fact, there are a few ratios that content specialists use in their customer communications, especially for social media, to ensure that posts are not too heavy on the sales side. In the earlier days, I used a ratio of 5:1 (entertainment + education : product promotion) across most channels, though there are some instances today where I would change the ratio to 3:1 (send me a message if you want to know more about this).

Today businesses, large and small, have developed content calendars for everything from World Hamburger Day to the UN International Day of the Girl so they can ‘feed the content beast’. While many of these ‘special days’ are commemorated on social media, there are often mentions in customer email newsletters (eDMs or email marketing).

Even in a year that has been so challenging, it can be very tempting to send a ‘happy new year email’ to all your customers who have provided marketing permissions. In my experience, this can be a HUGE mistake and here’s why…

Published research on this area is thin, but over the years when I have had the opportunity, I have looked into this first-hand. Anecdotally and some research states that around fifty percent of adults make new year’s resolutions. One of the top resolutions people have is to ‘get organised’ and this includes electronic organisation. The super-committed will look to get to ‘inbox zero’. Never has ‘getting organised’ been as easy as it is in your inbox today.

For consumers, come 1 January every year, almost all the businesses you have ever signed into, will let you know just who has your marketing permissions, allowing customers to quickly unsubscribe from multiple e-newsletters in a matter of minutes.

So, before you send that email to your customers tonight, is it worth the risk of losing a percentage of customers as they fulfill their plans to ‘Marie Kondo their inbox’?