Marketers are already getting much of this data via click through rates and open rates. They care much less about “how much you like an email” and much more about “how much an email is likely to make you buy in the future”.
The problem of course, is that people who aren’t buyers being annoyed by the email is a negative externality. It doesn’t affect the marketer’s bottom line at all if someone who was never a buyer gets annoyed. It slightly effects them if someone who was a potenjtial buyer gets annoyed, but only if that causes them not to buy in the future (which is reflected in CTR and Open rates).
The only way to have marketers not take advantage of a free marketing channel is to better align incentives. One way to do that would be to make it not free, as jacobjacob talked about in another thread. Collective spam filters like in gmail also provide a slight incentive for this, as messages being marked as spam will cause them to be marked as spam in customers’ inboxes as well. As you said this isn’t perfect because marketers don’t know WHICH messages are being marked as spam, but in general this feels decently solved, for instance most email marketing platforms have a “spam score” that will tell you if you’re likely to be filtered to the spam filter before you send, using the data THEY have on which messages are marked as spam.
In the end they do care about the fact that people buy, but the fact that marketers care about metrics like open rates suggest that it’s useful for them to have more information.
A lot of emails are send out as a form of content marketing where the goal of the company is to create a trusted relationship which can be later monetized. In those cases it’s not easy to measure the effects of an email on sales months down the road.
The fact that the marketing platforms have a spam score doesn’t mean that the spam score accurately captures the spamminess when it comes to how annoying the email is to customers.
Marketers are already getting much of this data via click through rates and open rates. They care much less about “how much you like an email” and much more about “how much an email is likely to make you buy in the future”.
The problem of course, is that people who aren’t buyers being annoyed by the email is a negative externality. It doesn’t affect the marketer’s bottom line at all if someone who was never a buyer gets annoyed. It slightly effects them if someone who was a potenjtial buyer gets annoyed, but only if that causes them not to buy in the future (which is reflected in CTR and Open rates).
The only way to have marketers not take advantage of a free marketing channel is to better align incentives. One way to do that would be to make it not free, as jacobjacob talked about in another thread. Collective spam filters like in gmail also provide a slight incentive for this, as messages being marked as spam will cause them to be marked as spam in customers’ inboxes as well. As you said this isn’t perfect because marketers don’t know WHICH messages are being marked as spam, but in general this feels decently solved, for instance most email marketing platforms have a “spam score” that will tell you if you’re likely to be filtered to the spam filter before you send, using the data THEY have on which messages are marked as spam.
Minor note: Jacobian and jacobjacob are different people
Whoops, edited.
In the end they do care about the fact that people buy, but the fact that marketers care about metrics like open rates suggest that it’s useful for them to have more information.
A lot of emails are send out as a form of content marketing where the goal of the company is to create a trusted relationship which can be later monetized. In those cases it’s not easy to measure the effects of an email on sales months down the road.
The fact that the marketing platforms have a spam score doesn’t mean that the spam score accurately captures the spamminess when it comes to how annoying the email is to customers.