Digital Marketing is eating into its own bread and butter
It struck me yesterday, just how useless email has become. Every morning I open my inbox to find nothing but "exciting offers" and "latest news" that I never asked for in the first place. I am now on a mission to stop every marketing email from entering my inbox, aggressively unsubscribing from everything. I do not care if I had once made the mistake of dropping in on your website or app, my email inbox is private to me. It is meant for my use, not yours.
SMS is a feature I sometimes have to use for the occasional OTP verification. Everything else, the entire SMS inbox, gets automatically ignored. It comes at the cost of sometimes missing important alerts, such as those about bank statements, but it is a price I am willing to pay.
Push Notifications. As it is, only 40-50% of your app users are typically subscribed to your notifications. Every notification you send, by default contributes to further decrease in this number. More push notifications contribute to unsubscribes and app uninstalls than to "engagement" and "conversion".
These are the big three — the biggest digital marketing channels. And digital marketers across the ecosystem are collectively working towards destroying them. Which is, I don't know, self-destructive, isn't it?
"Personalisation" is a word that has just begun to pick up steam. Everybody is talking about it, everybody claims to be doing it. But of course, all most companies (house services, food, payments... nearly everything) think of personalisation is having the username tag in their messaging. So that instead of saying, "Hi, buy this cowdung toothpaste on our website," marketers are able to say, "Hi Sugandha, buy this cowdung toothpaste on our website." Sometimes, companies such as Urbanclap screw that as well, and then send apology emails citing a "technical glitch in the previous email." Guys, it's the fifty (plus) year old email, how technically challenging can it be, really?
Email and SMS are already inching towards becoming obsolete. Push Notifications, owing to their vehement exploitation, might soon stop serving their purpose (both to users and marketers) too. That will leave us with IM and social-networks (which are anyway brewing sponsored listings and ad networks and such).
So, how are we dealing with this problem? By spending more time and thought on understanding personalization to implement it correctly, you think? WRONG. By looking for new marketing channels, new streams of communication that we can then bombard with irrelevant and annoying spam (oh yes, that's exactly what it is, you newsletter person).
Welcome to the 21st century — where people are just leads. But if it helps, dear fellow frustrated users (/leads), businesses are beginning to bear the brunt for it, running into huge losses owing to marketing expenditure. So much for easy, effective, creative and cheap digital and social marketing, huh?
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8 年Very well said, Sugandha. You won't believe I just de-spam my inbox by cliking unsubscribe for an hour. There were e-mails from channels I don't remember subscribing for. Same goes for SMS; why would I want to lose weight when I'm already thin? I have activated DND for two times now, but somehow these entities are able to break in. There promotion doesn't stop even when you urgently have to place a call on low balance and the IVRS on the other end suggests us to recharge as if we already don't know that we are running low on balance. It's so irritating. I think I'll develop a disorder out of the aggressiveness it causes. What I think the problem is the lack of will to sustain already subscribed customers and the zeal to add new ones every new day, as you have also mentioned that we're no more than leads to them. They are here to exploit our hard earned free time. P.S. The demonetisation stint wasted so much time, earnings and hardwork of ourselves. I believe it's been to hot the increasing purchasing power of the people which has triggered the inflation in recent past. Just a wild thought!