I have a confession. (Brace yourself. This is long.) I have four email accounts with a staggering 33,717 emails in them. Yes. That’s correct. Thirty-three thousand seven hundred seventeen emails. And by now I have even more.

How did I get here? Well, I have one work account and three personal accounts. It’s overwhelming. In fact, I was so overwhelmed that I recently set-up a new Gmail account, because I figured my Yahoo and Hotmail accounts are a total loss at this point. There’s no way I can delete and categorize almost 18,000 emails. (The other 14,637 are in my work email. I archived all of those so I don’t have to look at them.)

So far my new set up is going pretty well. Not perfect, but I don’t have 6,558 emails in my inbox. When I started writing this I had 72. I’m now up to 112. Granted, that doesn’t include my sent box. I refuse to look there.

Am I a typical email user? I’m not sure. According to Mintel Comperemedia research, 33% of people have two personal email accounts and 15% have three. I think that means I’m slightly atypical.

Granted, my email problem is partly my own mismanagement. It’s also partly due to my online ordering. But I’ll put some of the blame on the marketers as well. I know this is the age of personal responsibility, but I’m of the mindset that All Parties Contribute To The Situation.

It seems like marketers aren’t all that sophisticated in managing their email lists. For example, about nine years or so ago, for Christmas I ordered my sister-in-law a buffalo pillow. Nine years later I’m still getting emails from Wild Wings. Despite the fact that I’ve NEVER ordered anything else from the site. (For the record, I have nothing against buffalo or anything else wild. I just don’t want them in my living room.)

Clearly I’m not contributing significantly to Wild Wings revenue, profit, margin, etc. But email is cheap. Buying lists is not. So yes, I get it. But in addition to being able to track whether I’ve ever bought anything else, they should also be able to track whether I at least opened the email. See my point?

Despite getting dozens of emails every day from various retailers, I get no email from my bank. Like 70% of the US population (according to different Mintel Comperemedia research) I’m signed up to do online banking, so they have my email address. I even went in there to update my address. Then I noticed a “message center.”

I clicked on it.

And There Were Email Messages in there! Eleven of them to be exact. But the messages are only saved for 90 days, so who knew how many times my bank had emailed me.

For the life of me I cannot figure out how to change this. I can get a text alert for anything from when an outgoing wire transfer occurs to when there is a hold placed on my account. I love the granularity of the alerts, but most of them probably don’t apply to the average customer. I really want my bank to email me at my email address, not some random message center they’ve created for me. From my point of view it’s like sending my statement to the local branch and expecting me to go pick it up rather than sending it to my house.
Granted, I don’t want to hear from my bank every day, but I can think of several things that would be welcome. First and foremost would be a clear and easy way to opt-in to email messages. Aside from that, here’s a list of topics that I’m specifically interested in:

1) Functionality of mobile banking. Last week an article in American Banker highlighted the fact that to increase consumer adoption, more and better marketing needs to be done. Clearly all banks can do a better job in this area, not just mine.
2) Reward programs. I’m enrolled in the debit card rewards program. Emails about my points accumulation, special points programs, and redemption opportunities would be welcome.
3) New website and online banking features. I’m sure the bank changes things all the time. I’d like to know about this. But I don’t want to know about every little change. Just the big stuff. The things that affect how I do my banking.
4) General emails about how to make online banking more productive. Information about setting up automatic payment would be useful. Ebills would be even more useful.

Overall, my point is that email marketing needs to consider some very basic issues that seem to be overlooked. Such as allowing customers to opt in. In the meantime, I’m off to my local branch to see if they have any email for me.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites