Study reveals the “psychology” of e-marketing consumers.

February 16, 2011

The field of psychology and various psychological studies reveal that there are two types of people. When faced with a seemingly hopeless situation over and over again, some people will just give up and believe there is no way to overcome what is happening to them. For others, their mindset is far more optimistic and these people can work out a way to get away from the seemingly hopeless situation and change things to their benefit. 

But what has this got to do with marketing, whether field marketing or promotional marketing? Well, this psychological revelation is well worth considering when you are planning your promotional marketing strategy.

According to a new study of e-marketing, when faced with a continual stream of emails, Facebook messages or Tweets there are essentially two reactions:

• One group of people took action to unsubscribe themselves from the marketing campaign. 
• Another group utilised a rather amazing – and sometimes seemingly helpless – range of strategies do deal with the marketing communications.

The ExactTarget-CoTweet marketing study looked at how many people unsubscribed, un-liked, or stopped following companies through e-mail, Facebook and Twitter – and also why they stopped. 

The results found:

• 54% of consumers unsubscribe because e-mails come too frequently.
• 49% unsubscribed because content becomes repetitive or boring.
• 47% unsubscribed because they're overwhelmed by the e-mail they receive.
• 25% found the content irrelevant from the beginning.

But “unsubscribing” doesn't tell the whole story. There are those that remain subscribed but deal with the marketing emails in a range of different ways. 

• 17% delete the emails when they arrive.
• 8% label them spam or junk.• 6% ignore the emails.
• 2% take the time to set up filters so they do not need to see the emails. (This is rather amazing behaviour when people could simply unsubscribe!) 

The reason that this study is important to anyone who is delivering a marketing campaign or strategy is that it reveals that while consumers may not have unsubscribed, they might also be simply ignoring or point-blank deleting all the messages that are sent to them. And you will never know if they are doing this or not! 

The study revealed a similar pattern for Facebook messaging and Tweeting. 

So what can a promotional staff team learn from all this?

We all want to get our clients’ best deals and activities across to the greatest number of possible consumers. But if the messages are too frequent or too dull for some people they will simply be ignored, by whatever means the consumer chooses to take.

Instead there are several lessons to be learned for successful marketing

In our opinion it’s about knowing and targeting the right people with a promotional campaign. It’s important that you speak to the right people and you send them emails and messages that are wholly relevant and attractive to them.

One thousand promotional emails sent out to a widely differing demographic of consumers may interest only 5% of these people. But 100 emails sent to specific customers could easily interest a large majority.

And what works on e-mail for some consumers might not work on Facebook or Twitter, and vice versa.

Remember, too, that there are different expectations from each media channel. E-mail has become a more "impersonal" channel, and one that's open to just about everyone for communication. 

Facebook, on the other hand, is about building relationships via two-way communications. 

Twitter shares similarities with both e-mail and Facebook, but it's mainly used for quick "hits" of information.

The best solution is to customise a range of marketing campaigns via email, Facebook and Twitter to suit each audience and the demographic you believe will be most interested in your message or offer. 

The challenge as marketers is to spend time trying to truly understand the characteristics of the media you're using to communicate with consumers. 

It’s also vital that you think carefully about the content of each message. 

Marketing content needs to be:

• Interesting
• Eye-catching
• Customised for the media channel
• Created to make the consumer feel as though it’s directed and written especially for them, and to suit their age and circumstances.