How much is too much of a Good Thing?

Not long ago email was the focal point for many promotional campaigns for both online selling & offline selling. Now that so many more people are online and spending up to 20 hours each week online, email campaigns have become less of a focal point as a silver bullet for reaching consumers online.

So why are we inundated with so many emails from merchants every day? Email is still a great way to touch huge numbers of people in one motion. But we consumers will opt out of getting emails if we receive too many (some department stores) or there are too many that are not relevant deals (travel deal sites).

The emergence of time sensitive Social Commerce daily deal offerings has lead millions of us ( 70 million by Groupon’s subscriber count and 26 million by LivingSocial’s ) to be totally accepting of multiple daily emails from deal sites. Even though, often the deal is not relevant. The reason for their success is obvious to this consumer.

First, they offer a deep discount and that is very appealing and time sensitive. Also, consumers never have a clue as to what the deals of that day are going to be, so not only are they willing to be bombarded with emails daily, but they are anxious to see what the deal will be each day. The group nature and time sensitivity of Social Commerce offerings is also a key to consumers’ interest and willingness to have their inboxes fill up daily.

The key here is that deal being offered in the email is communicated in the title of the email. This allows one to easily determine if the deal email is of enough interest to even open the email offer. Or delete.

And as long as there are frequently relevant, hot deals in our emails from Social Commerce sites, we will welcome them.