wrote a post shortly before Christmas that discussed my irritation with a business that was sending me emails that were telling me to hurry, Hurry, HURRY because I had a very limited time to save, Save, SAVE! Bad enough that I got these shrieking subject lines delivered to me once a day for weeks. When the frequency rose to three emails in one morning, I got so annoyed I unsubscribed (and haven’t resubscribed since). I had regularly bought items from them, and had been on their mailing lists for several years. I even recommended them to other people. That company lost a client, and also lost my word of mouth advertising. I now use them as a poster child for how not to do a Christmas campaign.

Mark Brownlow recently wrote an article about the topic of urgency. My take-away from his post is that the strategy of “getting the immediate sales and we’ll worry about the rest later” is not sustainable. I agree. I also believe that the current methods some senders use to get around the system instead of changing with it will not work much longer and will in fact have very negative repercussions. This will be a very interesting and challenging year in the email marketing scene. We are, I think, at a tipping point.

Which side will your email operation come down on?