Email Marketing

We are all far too aware with email newsletters that waste our time, pitches that annoy us, and downright spam. I normally use one of my Gmail accounts as a general dumping ground for email marketing. I did my usual daily trawl last night to see if anything of interest had been sent through. As predicted, there was a huge list of offers and newsletters from number of companies. The first email was from amazon. I looked at the subject line; it said, “ Your Order with Amazon.com”. I instantly knew it’s an auto confirmation of a purchase I made few days ago so I just skimmed through it. Next it was eBay with the subject line, “Sumit, some recommendations for you”. I don’t use eBay that often and curiosity really got me. I really wanted to know what eBay thinks I would be interested in. I half-heartedly opened the email and I have to admit it woke me up a bit. The list of recommendation they had for me was quite interesting. How do they know that I am doing an MBA course? There were various books from business management and economics as a recommendation.

The email was clearly trying to market me the products in eBay based on my last purchase. My last purchase at eBay was a book by Kotler and Keller, “Marketing Management”, about a month ago. Clever-ish, except the fact that I do not need those books as of now.

I have been impressed with the way eBay email marketing has evolved over the past year or so. A while back, they started sending emails out asking users to rate the content within the email. They did this by asking recipients to click on the image for the star ratings they wanted to give the email, and I imagine it was used as a kind of quantitative way of measuring sentiment amongst email openers, effectively allowing them to score the content they’ve just seen. Continuing with the email I received, there were various general topics, which I bypassed. However, somewhere at the bottom there was an option for me to customize the email notifications