Today I got a huge shock when a bunch of emails ended up in my inbox. Apparently, they had gotten stuck somewhere (that’s my technical term for being on the server) and after many days of not receiving my usual number of emails, thousands began downloading within a very short period of time.
Knowing there wasn’t much I could do but get to the task at hand I began the process of filtering through the good, the bad and the ugly.
Sad to say, the majority of the over 4,000 messages were either bad or really, really ugly.
Less than 3% were worth my while. The rest were blatant promotions for things I have very little (if any) interest in and out and out garbage.
Here’s the deal, many of the promotional emails came from a small group of people. Not that promotional emails are bad, but when there’s no substance to the information or you receive dozens in a matter of days from the same person, that’s a problem.
Granted, the solution is to opt out, but until I had a boatload of emails arrive in very short order, I had no idea how bad it really is with some marketers.
My gosh. No wonder there is so much information overload and lots of emails don’t get read today.
This got me thinking about what I send out. Do I ever go overboard with promotions? For some, I likely do. For some, one promotional message would be too much. For others, they are happy with the amount I do send.
If we are in the business of marketing we do need to send out promotional messages. But we also need to be cognicent of the fact that we absolutely must provide value to our market and not always try to sell, sell, sell.
Each of us needs to take stock of what we are doing.

  • Do we balance our marketing with high value?
  • Do we market at all or is there a fear we will upset someone with even one message?
  • Do we always think in terms of serving first, selling second?

Definitely questions worth considering.