I used to get an email from Merlin Cycles once a week. I’d look at it to see if any of the sale items listed took my fancy and those emails probably triggered a few purchased from me. Lately however the number of emails from Merlin has shot up – this week I count 4 in my trash folder. They’re all unread and I’m likely to unsubscribe from Merlin’s emails soon.

Something similar happened years ago with CRC’s emails. They used to be fairly infrequent but at some point they became almost daily so I unsubscribed. Clearly for me there’s a “Goldilocks zone” for marketing emails of no more than once a week. Come companies clearly believe that more than that is better for their bottom line, though it has the opposite effect with me.

For those of you who are OK with receiving some marketing emails from online shops and the like, what’s your limit? When’s the point that’s too many emails instead of enough?

While I’m grumbling about marketing emails, has anyone else found themselves resubscribed to Evan’s marketing emails after previously unsubscribing then purchasing something from one of their shops? I’m pretty sure this has happened to me at least twice after buying stuff from their Edinburgh store.

Yeah, about one a week is my limit, currently Howies, Morvelo, and a couple of other who send infrequently.

Signed up a couple of days ago for Sportpursuit (saw the thread on here about cheap Rapha gear) and they’ve sent me four emails in three days…currently unsubscribing…

[ pulls up a chair … ]

One a week per shop is fine and will get a cursory read. Any more than that will get deleted straight away, and unsubscribed if I get round to it.

Not currently on any bike shop mailing lists, but having bought a few work shirts from both TM Lewin and CT Shirts, they seem to almost communicate, every time you get an email from one, 5 mins later their competitor emails.. Sometimes more than one a day (it seems anyway.. i haven’t actually checked)

The most annoying however must be sites that email you if you add anything into a shopping basket. I may do some late night phone browsing and add a few things into a basket to check and maybe buy another time.. *ping* email – “you’re forgotten something.. checkout now…” F&£*$ off!

J

Agree with the OP.

Funny enough I’ve been involved in a sales consultancy thing in  work recently. The golden rule seems to be a fair exchange of interesting content in exchange for allowing your brand to be etched in the mind of your customer, fair enough.

It seems most of the bike / bits / clothes places have lost that – I’ve unfollowed most of brands and retailers and unsubscribed from all of their mailing lists – it’s just a barrage of “buy, spend, consume” now.I know where to find Merlin, CRC, Wiggle and all the bike brands, so when I’m ready to buy I’ll go to them and buy whoever is cheapest or I like the look of.

Vosprung are one of the few that buck the trend, almost zero spam mail, a weekly interesting tech vid on FB and cool little widgets to buy and play with.

Sprung seem to push the fear element of not having your suspension bits serviced, but I have a bit of a rubberneck enjoyment seeing some poor sods Forks laid out and ruined. Perhaps I should talk to someone about that.

The most annoying however must be sites that email you if you add anything into a shopping basket. I may do some late night phone browsing and add a few things into a basket to check and maybe buy another time.. *ping* email – “you’re forgotten something.. checkout now…” F&£*$ off!

This has benefited me before, I have gone back to baskets once a sale has ended and the basket still has the items at sale price and lets me purchase at this price!  It almost became a tactic for me, add to basket leave for a few days and return to see if need item or was impulse buy and waste of money!

Why not set up a rule for them to move them into a “marketing” folder? That way they don’t clutter up your inbox.

You can also add “+companyname” to the first part of your email when signing up, i.e. for Chainreaction you give them “fred.smith+crc@wherever.com” as your email address. Any email set up like this will be sent to “fred.smith@wherever.com” but if it doesn’t come from CRC then you know they’ve sold your details on to someone else.

Back to the original question – more than one a week is definitely too much. They should really be less than that, maybe once a month.

Funny enough I’ve been involved in a sales consultancy thing in  work recently. The golden rule seems to be a fair exchange of interesting content in exchange for allowing your brand to be etched in the mind of your customer, fair enough.

—-

Vosprung are one of the few that buck the trend, almost zero spam mail, a weekly interesting tech vid on FB and cool little widgets to buy and play with.

There is a phrase: “Content is king.”

Content marketing out performs all other types of outbound/inbound marketing but it is also quite expensive to produce. It’s the reason why RedBull is so successful – all the content they create is fantastic, even if the drink is pure evil!

Leisure Lakes and Hannah from bleedin’ Polaris seem to be the worst offenders in my inbox. Though there was this bloke called Kelvin from Cotic who sent me two in one day earlier this month. 😉

whitestone Member
Why not set up a rule for them to move them into a “marketing” folder? That way they don’t clutter up your inbox.

I reckon that if I’m needing to declutter marketing emails from my inbox then I’m receiving too many of them and they’ll get deleted without reading no matter where they’re stored.

Weirdly my Merlin email’s seem to be quite limited whereas CRC seems daily

Perhaps I just described for Merlin???

The new year Merlin emails worked out well.. I got a load of stuff I will need to replace at 50% .. like cassettes and chains.

Content marketing out performs all other types of outbound/inbound marketing but it is also quite expensive to produce. It’s the reason why RedBull is so successful – all the content they create is fantastic, even if the drink is pure evil!

Actually their ‘content’ is mostly expensively produced guff and nothing they can do will ever make me like the brand or its ghastly product. But each to their own I guess.

I like the way Cotic communicates. It’s informative, chatty and like hearing from a mate rather than being a endless sales spiel. I think the guys there do it really well and it’s in keeping with the feel of the brand.

I thought quite hard about this when Howies’ Froome tee-shirt e-mail dropped into my in-box the other day. It was bit like finding out that someone you’d always thought of as a mate, was in fact a massive idiot. And the fact that you’d effectively invited them into your life made it worse, almost like a betrayal. E-mail can be a really intimate way to communicate, but it has the potential to cut both ways I guess.

Don’t think for a second that these emails are just sent out willy nilly. The marketing departments will have huge amounts of data on click rates, conversion rates, which day of the week is best to send, is it better morning or afternoon etc etc. If sending four emails a week was having a negative effect on the impact of the marketing emails they would know almost immediately and would stop doing it.

You can also add “+companyname” to the first part of your email when signing up, i.e. for Chainreaction you give them “fred.smith+crc@wherever.com” as your email address. Any email set up like this will be sent to “fred.smith@wherever.com” but if it doesn’t come from CRC then you know they’ve sold your details on to someone else.

That’s not a whatever.com feature, it’s something Gmail does.  Other providers may do it also (I’m not aware of any offhand but it’s certainly possible), anything to the left of the @ is down to your email provider to parse.

The ones that get me are the “please review your experience/product” ones.

Buy a basic tool or spare part from Evans Cycles and a day later there’s an email asking for my experience when buying it, a review of the product, would I recommend it…

WTF? I walked in, went to the tools rack, picked out a pedal spanner, took it to the till where the transaction was completed with the minimum necessary interaction and I was able to use the product as advertised to remove the pedals. How the **** does that warrant a review?! What would I write in a recommendation? If you wish to remove your pedals and have £8.99 to spend, then yes, 5 stars. If you don’t have either £8.99 or a need to remove your pedals, then zero stars.

I mean, Sainsbury’s wouldn’t send me an email asking for my experience of buying a carton of milk and could I please review the product…

Funnily enough just having this conversation a friend this morning.. Marketing often puts me off in two ways.

Firstly, the sheer volume, if i am getting the normal 10 a week from CRC, then i am deleting them now without ever really reading them unless the title has “20% off shimano for next 2 days” or similar and i am actually looking for a part.

Or the other thing for me is that “flowerymarketingspeakwankybollocks” as seen often on  Instagram, I happened to glance this morning on the Bowman Bikes instagram page, whilst it has some lovely pictures of shiny bikes, they also call their page “Bike Inspiration Cupboard” or you get the Rapha page selling mintyarselard, sorry Chamois Cream, by describing it as “using herbs picked by 16 year old virgin daughters of past tour winners on the slopes of Mount Ventoux using only Swiss steel scissors” it’s frickin bum cream!!

My limit is none, I unsubscribe from all marketing material.

[ comes out from behind chair ]

I think metric and data driven emails can be very off putting, creepy even. The Cotic ones are normally just whatever is in Cy’s mind, that he thinks riders might be interested to hear. The double FlareMAX email I sent out when he was off ill was probably a mistake… but I wanted to show off the colours/graphics, and hadn’t in the first email.

@Cougar – It’s actually part of the email standard (RFC822) and has been for twenty years or so. Gmail is the best known provider that promotes its use but every email server and relay should honour such addresses.

The only time I’ve had problems with it is when a shop asks for an email address and their data entry system only allows fred.smith@…

I did the same as you MW early January and now have zero marketing emails.  The only one I had a problem with was BT who don’t always put an unsubscribe link in their emails.  I had to raise a formal complaint to get removed and even then they said it could take 28 days to work through the system.  I’m looking forward to them getting hammered when GDPR comes into effect.

I’ve no idea where the UK stands as regards GDPR… do we have to adhere to it?

<span class=”brand”>Summary: </span>The Queen’s Speech has confirmed that the General Data Protection Regulation will form part of UK law following the country’s withdrawal from the European Union. The Speech noted that “Over 70% of all trade in services are enabled by data flows, meaning that data protection is critical to international trade.”

@Cougar – It’s actually part of the email standard (RFC822) and has been for twenty years or so. Gmail is the best known provider that promotes its use but every email server and relay should honour such addresses.

Really?  I sit corrected.  I shall have to experiment…

There are many annoying aspects to it. I’ve held off unsubscribing from Merlin for as long as I have because occasionally they do have some offers I want to take advantage of. However because I am fed up with all of their emails there’s a good chance I’ll delete those relevant offers because I am so used to all the irrelevant guff they try to pass off as once-in-a-lifetime bargains.

If companies offered more choices than “spam me whenever you feel like” and “never talk to me again” I’d probably be receiving emails from more companies than I do.

CRC is terrible for not shutting up after you make a purchase. They want you to review the product, then they want you to review themselves internally, then with Trustpilot (or similar), plus they’ll remind you once or twice about each of these if you don’t respond to them immediately.

I understand that major retailers will have analytic and marketing engines that drive the content and frequency of their marketing emails but it seems likely that their approach puts off some customers, even if it works for others. It feels like Merlin are sending out the same emails to everyone who subscribes to receive emails from them. If I was able to specify a lower frequency of emails and less roadie kit in those emails then they’d have more success with me. As a one size fits all approach their current strategy may work well for them but with a bit of individual tailoring it could work better.

They want you to review the product, then they want you to review themselves internally, then with Trustpilot (or similar)

and review Collect+ ! Every time you use it!

I find the unsubscribe functions work pretty well, and I that includes the ‘review your purchases’ type e-mail. Think the only ones I get now are Charlie the Bikemongers, and they are very infrequent, or ones where I’ve entered a competition and assume I’ll have a better chance of winning if I agree to subscribe. They get unsubscribed pretty quickly after.

I’ve no idea where the UK stands as regards GDPR… do we have to adhere to it?

Very much so, yes.

I’ve just tested the “<name>+<something else>@<host>” thing that whitestone mentioned above and it doesn’t work with my Yahoo email account – the message bounced. But then again, if it’s part of the standard that the plus and the following text should be ignored when it comes to addressing what’s to stop companies just deleting that bit of email addresses if they want to sell them on?

We did some analysis at work of the unsolicited email received by people in the dept (on their own emails, not work – and shared voluntarily).  The difference in contact rate between organisations was interesting – some fashion brands would do multiple emails per day if there was a sale on, others were daily etc.  Of course this doesn’t tell you what they didn’t get selected for but there were a few getting email from some sources who didn’t always get the same amount of contact.  2 or 3 a week seemed to be the max for most but many were weekly or less.

Evans resubscribe you using the soft opt in but IMO they’re pushing it when you’ve unsubscribed and they resubscribe you.  I’m not sure I’ve seen a place to opt out of marketing email when making an online purchase which there should be if they are fully complying with the legislation.  But there again I haven’t looked that closely because I don’t buy stuff from the often and then just unsubscribe when I get the first email from them.

I thought quite hard about this when Howies’ Froome tee-shirt e-mail dropped into my in-box the other day. It was bit like finding out that someone you’d always thought of as a mate, was in fact a massive idiot. And the fact that you’d effectively invited them into your life made it worse, almost like a betrayal. E-mail can be a really intimate way to communicate, but it has the potential to cut both ways I guess.

Haha, I was just boggled at how they thought that was a good idea and got it signed off.

Even considered starting a thread on here about it, but realised the internet has enough doping related threads already.

The ones that get me are the “please review your experience/product” ones.

And how am I gonna write a meaningful review of a tyre two days after it’s arrived? Just detracts from the credibility of the whole user review system.

I just delete them until I get bored with that and then I unsubscribe.

I find the spam cryptocurrency ones the most annoying as they’re harder to unsubscribe from ……..

<div>whitestone</div>

@Cougar – It’s actually part of the email standard (RFC822) and has been for twenty years or so. Gmail is the best known provider that promotes its use but every email server and relay should honour such addresses.

Neither of my Exim servers or Exchange seem to want to listen to RFC822 and so far the only MTA  that behaves is Gmail.

Interesting.

Just tested the + with iCloud and my other email, works a treat.  Thanks for that, I’ll be using that a lot in future

The Cotic ones are normally just whatever is in Cy’s mind, that he thinks riders might be interested to hear. The double FlareMAX email I sent out when he was off ill was probably a mistake… but I wanted to show off the colours/graphics, and hadn’t in the first email.

I was only kidding about yours Kelvin. I don’t mind them because they don’t turn up every other day, and more importantly, most of them actually interest me.

Cotic’s emails are among the most interesting, but they are a very different business to CRC, Merlin, PX etc.

You’re not gonna impulse buy a new bike every few days… although a couple of years ago I was pretty close to that turnover.

😀

A while ago I decided I’d try to fill up my gmail as much as possible. Currently at 17600 emails in the promotions tab. Mostly from beliefnet, casserole-recipe-of-the-day, ieee-spectrum, daily-science-fiction, recipe-of-the-day, a-joke-a-day, knit-picky-patterns. Quality stuff.

thepurist Subscriber
Evans resubscribe you using the soft opt in but IMO they’re pushing it when you’ve unsubscribed and they resubscribe you. I’m not sure I’ve seen a place to opt out of marketing email when making an online purchase which there should be if they are fully complying with the legislation. But there again I haven’t looked that closely because I don’t buy stuff from the often and then just unsubscribe when I get the first email from them.

I was resubscribed in response to in-store purchases. I wasn’t asked if it was OK if they added me to their mailing list, but shortly afterwards I got an electronic receipt (fair enough), a review request (sort of OK I suppose) and a newsletter (definitely unwanted) arriving in my inbox.

My local Evans is the most convenient bike shop for me so I sometimes stop in for minor purchases but if they are going to keep doing this then I’ll shop elsewhere.

It’s actually part of the email standard (RFC822) and has been for twenty years or so.

I’ve just read the RFC (because Geek) and unless I’m being blind I can’t see any reference to this.  It’s not in RFC2822 (which supersedes it) either.  It’s “part of the standard” in so far as the RFC defines it as a legal character, but makes no mention of it having special behaviour.

So I stand by my original statement – it’s down to the individual email provider to provide this sort of functionality.  Gmail is the well known one, seems Apple do it too, and Google would suggest there’s a couple of others (notably anything that’s built on sendmail), but it’s not something you can guarantee or even expect.

Of course, the robust solution to this is to register your own domain name.  The address on my profile here is stw@mydomain, if I start getting spam there then it’s trivial to block the address.

If sending four emails a week was having a negative effect on the impact of the marketing emails they would know almost immediately and would stop doing it

You’d like to believe that but lots of smaller outfits are run by people who seem to get the data, it doesn’t fit with what they believe in their own minds so they just keep sending stuff out :(.  It not great for them as one you’ve unsubscribed it’s impossible for them to resubscribe you.  If they just turned down the frequency you would probably stay on the list