This may come as a bit of a surprise but I only check my personal emails once a week.
Yes, in this crazy, joined up, interconnected world we live in, it is actually still possible to resist the urge to ignore incoming communications - for a considerable period of time. I also only open my snail mail post once or twice a week too (although there's much, much less of that).
This gives me a fairly interesting perspective on the marketing tactics of some companies. In one batch of weekly emails I can have as many as five promotional emails from a some organisations, with varying deals and offers, each one better than the last. I don't open them all. In fact the more there are, the less I open.
In the snail mail pile, it's the same. One persistent offender is a leading online butcher and it would not be unusual for me to have 2 separate pieces of direct mail plus several emails from this organisation over the course of an average week.
There's only so many times a girl can buy steak.....
Now I'm the first to appreciate that frequency of contact in marketing is an essential ingredient for success, but there is such a thing a too much frequency. Too much contact. Too much invasion into the "top of my mind".
In fact it feels as if some of these companies communicate with me more often than my family. That they believe they should be party to my daily life.
Are they desperate for sales? The quality of their marketing would suggest not. But their communication patterns suggest otherwise.
So far I've held back from cutting them off completely by justifying to myself the convenience of having yummy steak delivered straight to my door, and the possibility that unsubscribing may send them into an even blinder panic of over-marketing to get me back. Like the gym, who now communicate with me more often now that I am no longer a member, than they did when I was.
Interestingly we recently took the less is more approach and recommended to one of our clients that they do a little bit less on social, and a little bit less frequent email marketing and, guess what, their online sales have gone up, conversion rates are growing and attrition is falling. Result!
Perhaps we're just too busy to absorb it all. Of course it's great to develop relationships with your customers, but please try to remember they are customers, not your best mate or your spouse.
There's an importance in not being too earnest....... don't you think?
We are now several months into Tesco's latest marketing campaign, The Tesco Price Promise.
And the anecdotal results I can see on social media are very interesting.
On the face of it, this should be a successful campaign. What's not to like, at the heart of a recession, about promising your customers that, if you (accidentally) overcharge them, they'll get that overcharge off their very next shop? What's not to enjoy about your loyalty being rewarded and a financial incentive to return?
But there's a downside. If you continually overcharge your customers, and give them a piece of paper to prove that you are doing it. Every week. Then it's only a matter of time before the customer sits up and thinks "Hey, wait a minute here...."
And the flip side? Well, if you are saving money, it's only a matter of time before you get a little peeved that everyone's getting money off vouchers except you.....
This latest price promotion could spell disaster for the market leader. Already CNBC is predicting Tesco's fall from power, and rival supermarket chains are stepping up their marketing messages to compete with the price promise juggernaut head on. Sainsbury's is even challenging Tesco through official channels that their "comparisons" are not even real comparisons, and you have to agree: it's hard to compare the Fair Trade coffee to the ground coffee that was unethically extracted from its suppliers at rock bottom prices....
Social media is further fueling the spread of this disgruntlement, with irritated shoppers posting up pictures of their receipts, demonstrating just how much cheaper it would have been for them to do their grocery shop elsewhere.
This doesn't really affect our household. We switched our weekly grocery shop to the so called "premium" supermarket Marks & Spencer a few years ago. At an average saving of £40 on the weekly shop, the two grand annual saving is worth the stick we get from our friends for pretending to be posh. Quite frankly, I'd rather be "pretend posh" than poor.
A few recent trips to Tesco, to just get a few things, have resulted in numerous money off coupons, and our astonishment that just a couple of carrier bags of "bits and bobs" can come to such a high amount.
I simply pity the poor families who shop there weekly, on limited budgets, and see their hard earned wages going straight to Tesco's bottom line.
So what should Tesco do now?
Well, the sensible option would be to cut its prices.
It might eat into some of the £1.4 billion pre-tax profits it has made in the last six months, but it's likely to lose less customers in the long term.
Since the start of the recession, shopping habits have changed immensely. Discount shopping is no longer stigmatised, coupons are considered valuable commodities but, despite these changes, long term shopping habits remain a constant.
And once a customer has shifted their main supermarket, it is doubly difficult to lure them back.
As a marketer, I can promise them that.
