Kate Kaye at Protocol discusses how the impact of losing access to third-party company data has made retailers even more incentivized to acquire the email addresses of customers this holiday season. This is hardly surprising, and a logical response of retailers to deal with an impaired ability to target their ideal customer profile through paid advertising channels such as display, search and social.
One wonders whether limiting the effectiveness of marketers in one channel just drives them to others, and whether that ultimately results in a better experience for consumers.
Which is worse - being advertised to with relevant messages, or being advertised to with irrelevant messages?
A push to more email marketing from loosely related retailers may drive customers to explore options to keep their inbox clean. Email clients have begun to emerge (see Superhuman and Hey) that create a whitelisting process which forces all new email senders to be vetted before they make it to a user's inbox. A shift to email marketing risks spoilage of that channel in the same way we've seen the rise of ad-blocking software to target display ads.
If marketers see opt-in email as the path forward in an era where targeting through paid channels has become less effective, they need to very careful to make sure that the content they produce is at least as relevant and as targeted as their paid ads, if not more so, otherwise this channel too may cease to bear fruit.
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