Speculation over the past 18 months has been rife that email marketing is dead. Dead is probably far too harsh a term, but I think most progressive digital marketeers would agree that the sooner bad email marketing dies the better! By bad I mean, un-targeted, badly designed, sliced-up image-laiden email messages that can only be summarised as e-mail fail.
So when one of the guys in our team got an announcement from Ben & Jerry’s, that they were stopping their monthly customer email, I thought it would make a brilliant blog post on a big company making a massive digital marketing mistake…
On closer inspection, it’s actually an extremely very well planned and executed piece of digital marketing. Take a look: Ben & Jerry’s is Moo-ving
Here’s 3 reasons why I think they did the right thing:
1. They asked their subscribers what they wanted…
Asking their audience what they wanted, before making a decision like this, is the best way to decide. By asking their customers and then referring back to that in their communication it’s ten times harder for their subscribers to do anything other than just go with it.
2. They exited in style…
Ben & Jerry’s emails have always brought a smile to my face (and they’ll be missed), but the excuse that their ‘hooves simply weren’t built to type quickly‘ is light-hearted, tongue in cheek, but basically says that they only have so much digital marketing resource and they are going to move it to where their customers want it to be.
3. They left the barn door open…so the cows could come home
Digital marketing is always changing and they’ve cleverly not ruled out future e-mails – ‘it was too hard to say goodbye to e-mools altogether, so we’ll still send you the odd email on special occasions‘.
So the future for Ben & Jerry’s lies in the social media playground of facebook and twitter, considering all of the above I like their thinking.
P.S. Ben & Jerry’s got a great ‘festival themed’ homepage at the moment, well worth a click (and turn up the speakers!)
Great article, did you see I wrote about it yesterday too or was it just a coincidence you mentioned me?! I do hope they continue to contact me from time to time, as we always said their emails were fantastic.
I’m not sure how they asked which medium I preferred to be contacted on, suggesting that they only asked people who use Facebook if they liked to hear information from them….on Facebook. Surely the fairest way is to use all mediums to get people to vote?
I completely agree that this change has been well planned and communicated. Email offers a lot of benefits that are completely different to those offered by social media. It is all about what is appropriate to the audience and the message. If their customers are saying they prefer to be communicated with through social media, then that is the best place to be. I would imagine they’ve also looked at the open and clickthrough rates, which would tell them if the newsletter was meeting it’s objectives. As you mentioned, they have said that they will still use email to communicate, it just won’t be in the form of a newsletter now. Occasional emails that are targeted and personalised could even be more effective than a monthly newsletter in this case.
Hi Becs, the reference to your website just fitted nicely, I blogged about it the day they sent out the e-mail. Great minds think alike
Hi Becs – your point about where they asked their customers how they wanted to be communicated with is spot on. It would definitely skew the results massively if they used social media as the only survey method. Maybe they should have asked the people that subscribed to the newsletter to provide feedback through a poll or an online survey.
Some great thoughts over on Hubspot about the importance of the relationship between email and social media: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6217/Ben-Jerry-s-Drops-Email-Marketing-In-Favor-of-Social-Media.aspx
Some great comments on there too… well worth a scan.