Are you putting yourself in the Spam Folder?

A simple guide to how to avoid losing existing customers by not being a marketing nuisance.

Once upon a time in the distant past of the 1990’s, businesses would be careful about their marketing spending. Getting prime time advertising on radio and TV was tricky, having to spend large and being booked long in advance. Getting flyers delivered to mailboxes, while cheaper, still needs planning weeks before delivery. In the now of the 2020’s, with a few minutes of work you can send out a tweet or facebook post and email everyone you’ve ever had dealings with your latest promotion. And that’s the problem. The cheaper and easier it’s become to get marketing out there, the more companies are doing it and in the process spamming people to the point that as soon as they see the source they send it to the spam folder. You don’t want your business to be in that position. So we are going to teach you how to market frequently without being a nuisance to your potential customers.

The changing nature of marketing

Way way back in 2013 I wrote an article about when you should time your flyer marketing. A very early work, quite short and a little out of date given how much the marketing landscape has changed over the last eight years. Given the ease and low cost of marketing through the internet, it flipped the conversation over from ‘when should I spend the money doing marketing marketing’ to ‘when shouldn’t I spend the time marketing.’ So let us look at how the marketing landscape has changed and how it affects the way you market your business.

How you could be doing it wrong

To me there is one guiding principle for all 2020’s marketing, that your existing and potential customers are time poor. We consume so much media these days, often having several devices at the same time. Hands up how many of you have had a podcast or a video playing in the background while also scrolling through your phone or on the tablet looking at your social media or browsing the internet. I know I do. As such, time has become more important to people than ever before. If they aren’t getting the information they consider relevant, they are going to skip that post or delete that email without looking at it. Do that often enough and they will block or unsubscribe you, and potentially even stop using your services if you annoy them enough. Remember this mantra above all else:

People’s time is worth more to them than you are, so respect it.

What do I mean by this? Simply put, unless you are a very unique business offering a service that no one else can supply, customers can change to a different business at any time for the same goods or services. Another factor that has to be taken into account is that people generally forget about the good service you give them, but never forget the bad. Sending an excessive amount of content or marketing to them is one form of bad service. Another risk of marketing too often is that you start becoming background noise to people, where as soon as they see it’s you they ignore you because ‘it’s just another post’ and not something interesting or unique that they have to look at.

What are the categories of marketing that you can do

To keep things simple I like to break marketing down to the following categories. Medium which you use to send out this marketing isn’t so relevant, more the nature of what it is. They fall into three broad categories: social, informative, and promotional.

Social

This is the public face of the business. The purpose of this category is to promote the values and ‘personality’ of the business. You’re not selling your services or products. What are you selling is that point of differentiation between yourself and your competitors.

Informative

You’re providing information that can be useful to customers without any direct expectation of it generating sales. (This blog article is an example of informative marketing.) It can also be a useful tool for you too, by a readily accessible resource of information that can be used to help explain processes or products to customers, saving you time and effort.

Promotional

This is the ‘selling’ part of the marketing spectrum. These are where you promote your product, show a saving, give an incentive. All of it is about getting people spending money with you.

What happens when you post too often?

As mentioned above, you become noise to the recipient. Just another post that was quickly scanned and ignored. Eventually over time if it continues to happen they may flag you as spam. Being flagged as spam is detrimental to the presence of your business online. Clearly you going to spam in the email is bad as then important information gets lost, making it harder to connect with clients. On social media platforms like Facebook, an account that gets flagged as a spammer will find their posts hidden from their subscribers. While net searching isn’t directly affected by being flagged as a spammer, the fact that you become less visible on other sites means you’re less active to google engine and will end up further down the search engine results.

The worst effect is how your customers feel about your business. Unless you really anger them it’s very rare for someone to complain about getting too many messages. What will happen is they will ignore you, unsubscribe, and not do any more business with you. But it gets worse. Because you have earned a bad reputation with one customer, they will then pass that opinion to others, reducing your chances of getting those people’s business.

Too Frequent or Not Frequent Enough

This can be a challenge for most small businesses to get right. Unless you have a degree in marketing, it’s hard to know how often to do various types of marketing emails and posts. Also it takes time out of your day to deal with it which you could be spending growing your business in other ways. If you send out emails and posts constantly you become noise to your customers who will just send you to spam or skip over your posts  You might not be doing it often enough, putting it in to the ‘when I have time’ box and never getting around to it, and in the process slowly being forgotten by your customers. The second one is an easy trap to fall into as we have done it ourselves.

So how often should you be creating and posting marketing items? That depends on the nature of the business and what you are sending out. I’ll list a few examples of what different businesses can do and how to treat it. This isn’t a hard and fast set of rules, more a general guideline. Over time you’ll develop the feel for your clients preferences.

Type	Style and medium	Frequency
A fun social item An image, video, article, that doesn’t have any direct link to your business	Social – Social media only	Rarely if not at all – you’re not their friend you’re a business, so a professional image is expected
A trades person posting images or video of the view from a location they are working at	Social – Social media	Occasionally – a couple of times a month
Examples of completed work	Social – website, social media	Weekly to Fortnightly Especially good if there’s a matching positive review
A photos with text about a new product or service	Informative – social media	As new products come to hand. Reminder posts can happen after a long period.
A blog article about some interesting fact or useful information	Informative – put on to website and link via a monthly email newsletter or social media post	Fortnightly to Monthly Can be weekly if it’s short and easy to digest
Video or article from another source that relates to your business	Informative – link in email newsletter, link by social media post	Fortnightly to Monthly
Reminders of important dates that would effect customers	Informative – email and social media	Only when needed
Product Promotions	Promotional – email and social	One or two days before start of promotion Optional –  follow up a few days before the end of promotion

When you compare what I’ve suggested here is just a fraction to what you see commonly suggested by a lot of online marketing companies. I’ve seen some recommendations every couple of days for a small to medium sized business as the minimum. The reality is that it’s more giving them billable work than growing and promoting their business. Unless your full time job is an influencer, there is no justification for generating a huge amount of online posts. It isn’t your business and your customers will become numbed by it or put off by the volume of work.

In Conclusion

Before you post anything remember:

People’s time is worth more to them than you are, so respect it.

If you are unsure if it’s worth other’s time to read it, then it’s likely not to be. Better to post a little less frequently and be a surprise than to post too frequently and be an annoyance.

Still not sure how to manage your digital marketing? Need advice or for someone to manage it all for you. Talk to us at Copy Express and we can put you on to the path of more effective physical and digital marketing.