I’m sure like me, you’ve lost count of the emails begging you to remain on various marketing lists over the last couple of weeks leading up to the dreaded GDPR deadline. It annoyed and inspired me in equal measure which is why I have just bought 100 tins of Spam and will be mailing them shortly. More on that later.
Quite why they had waited so long to clean their database I do not know, as the vast majority of them seem to have never bothered emailing me before. In and amongst the legal waffle, they seemed to be asking me to stay on their marketing list, despite appearing to offer nothing of any value. It was as if out of the blue someone remembered they had a newsletter facility and a tonne of emails and thought it was worth a shot at getting me to opt-in again. For the numbers.
Now, this would have been a whole lot more likely to happen if they had been emailing me regularly with valuable content. I might have been a lead then, or even a prospect. They should have been able to segment their list into ‘never opens’ ‘sometimes does’ ‘doesn’t engage’ ‘clicks on loads of stuff’ or similar marketing jargon to that effect but I can only imagine that for the vast majority this didn’t happen. Sadly, I suspect even after the frantic May spring clean it STILL won’t happen.
What a waste of data. Marketers may well be feeling a tad deflated because their email list has shrunk by almost 50 percent or more but this is madness. There is nothing but vanity and ego in jealously guarding the total number of subscribers and seeing that as your metric for success. It matters not a jot if you are bellowing your message out to a stadium full of people if half of them have their headphones on and aren’t listening and another quarter of them didn’t even know they why they were there in the first place. Remember, when it comes to your marketing, size really doesn’t matter.
So here’s my next marketing move after GDPR, or #GregDoesPR as I prefer it. As you may recall, I emailed you offering you a recipe for Spam or to opt back into my newsletter or both. You might say it was very ‘tongue in cheek’. Sorry. So I’m now going to go old-school marketing and do some direct mail to help grow my list again with new leads.
That’s right, I’ve actually bought 100 tins of Spam to mail out to some carefully chosen people I would LOVE to work with but who ARE NOT already on my list.
Why 100? Well, it easily splits into percentages and I can start managing and measuring the success of this next campaign at a glance. Remember folks,100 is NOT the key number here…Will some of these people laugh at me and not with me? Maybe. Will some think I’m an idiot? Perhaps.
Will some drop me a line to set up a free PR strategy call? You betcha. Will some of these people end up on my newsletter list? Of course. However, you can bet your life it won’t be me putting them on there and hoping they stay. They will put themselves on there because they like my message, my method and my marketing.
That or they really like Spam.
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