photo credit: alykat

I may be thick as a post but I can’t see email as an acquisition tool. And I’m beginning to wonder about its potential for customer relations.

I’ve probably asked 5,000 people “Have you ever responded to an email from a company you’ve never dealt with before?” In 8 years, nobody’s ever said “Yes”. But everyone buys something online and gets followup emails.

I buy flowers three times a year from ProFlowers. They send me maybe 24 emails a year but I respond to three.

1-800-CONTACTS emails me so often, they must think I wear three or four lenses at once.

Barnes & Noble reaches out all the damned time with special offers on DVD’s and CD’s but I’ve never bought either one from them. I buy lots of books, though, and I’m buying a lot fewer of them at B&N than I used to.

Borders sends 30% off coupons I can use for anything. Even better, they don’t charge me to belong to their “club” and it’s got real benefits. B&N wants $25 and I just won’t pay them for their own loyalty program. I spend a lot more at Borders these days.

American Airlines and Jet Blue haven’t noticed that all of my flights for the past four years have originated in Fort Lauderdale; they send me specials for people flying out of LaGuardia and JFK. Useless to me down here.

Alamo car rental? Lots of email but so far not one deal at any of the destinations I go to most often.

Costco? This amazes me because I buy a lot of stuff at their big store on Biscayne Boulevard. They email me regularly but not once have they ever sent me an offer for anything I’ve bought in the past. A buck off mixed nuts and I’d be all theirs.

Email that theoretically interests direct marketers seems to be limitless and I just delete it all nowadays. I used to read them when the Subject Line promised some kind of useful information but I had to log on first, sometimes remember a password, answer a whole lot of questions … and then find an ad with no information at all. Overpromise and underdeliver. To hell with it. Denny Hatch’s online column is the sole exception.

I stayed at a hotel in Venice Beach a few years ago and they email me a couple of times a month. If I ever have to stay in Venice Beach again, I’ll probably take them up on an offer.

What seems to be going on here is that a lot of companies are sending benefit-free emails that contain nothing of any interest. Borders does an excellent job; ProFlowers and 1-800-CONTACTS do so so jobs. The rest of them? A total waste of time.

Maybe it’s because the medium is “free”. A few years ago, someone brilliant suggested that the USPS charge postage of a quarter of a cent for sending an email to any computer in the USA. Normal everyday business people who send 25 emails a day would have to pay about 35 cents a week. Let’s do it.

Even just a quarter of a cent per email would make legitimate emailers think twice before sending out the completely self-serving crapola we’re getting now and it’d stop spammers in their tracks. Not to mention all those “jokes”.