First of all, I’m sure that some of the readers of this post have been victim to my extremely aggressive emails about Dragon speech recognition software.  I’m going to ignore the famous advice: “let anyone of you among us without sin cast the first stone…”

Secondly, I’m going to provide “constructive criticism” to a company that I respect a great deal: Casper.  They make a fantastic product and they disrupted the mattress industry by leveraging smart marketing, seamless e-commerce, and innovative packaging.

I had the opportunity to experience the Casper commerce process when I purchased a mattress for my son in April of this year.  As I expected, the purchase was quick, the delivery was fast, the packaging was cool – and it was actually fun to unpack the mattress because you got to see it inflate in front of your eyes.

Here is the criticism part: since the purchase, I have received 11 email messages from Casper.  To be fair, one was a shipment confirmation and a second one was an appropriate follow-up survey to see how I liked the product – along with a reminder, for a total of 3 emails.  That leaves 8 emails that are marketing-related, including 6 emails in a 15 day period.

After I received the first couple emails, I thought “they have to slow this down after the first few – how often could any one person be in the market for mattress-related stuff?” How naive of me to think such a thing.  I have received a marketing-related message from Casper at least once a week since I purchased my initial mattress.

My guess is that they have analyzed each email campaign and realized that they generate a certain amount of email from each email drop.  What they probably aren’t looking at closely enough is the email opt-out rate.  I would have dropped out after 4 or 5 emails on a weekly basis, but I have continued out of curiosity.

Here’s what I recommend: After the first few emails, ask your customer to set their communications preferences.  You can selectively send this message to people who have not responded or interacted with any of your emails.  Offer a weekly, monthly, or quarterly update schedule.  Or offer them control over the types of messages that you get.

I’m not against frequent email communications – as long as it is relevant and appropriate.  More frequent communication is fine for certain products:

• Consumable product (like Nespresso),
• Complex product with lots of updating information (like developer tools), or
• Shopping stores that sell lots of products (like Amazon)

Mattresses? I’ve hear enough about them – and even though I love their product, I’m opting out.

For the curious, I’ve included all my email communications from Casper below.

 

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