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June 01, 2010
Are you suffering from e-mail bankruptcy?
I spent a lot of time over the holiday weekend trying to clean out the messy overloaded closet that is my e-mail. And, ironically enough, one of the messages I came across was a MediaPost blog on how people manage their e-mail.
According to blogger Kara Trivunovic, senior director for the e-mail and social media marketing firm StrongMail Systems, every e-mail user falls into one of three categories:
Filers, who immediately put everything away in a relevant folder, to be accessed later.
Pilers (that would be me), who hoard e-mails in their in-boxes because they “might need it someday.”
And dumpers, who periodically do a clean sweep, deleting everything when messages pile up or get too old. Kara calls this e-mail bankruptcy, although I would apply the term to any time your message goes kaput.
Kara maintains that all three styles present problems for marketers: the filer, because he doesn’t really read anything, just stores it; the piler, because messages get lost at the bottom of the stack; and the dumper, whose nuclear strategy mean everything gets blown up.
These styles have implications for anyone who wants to get an e-mail message across. But for me, they add up to one piece of advice for anyone creating e-mail: If you’re writing a text e-mail, you need to make sure your subject line and first few sentences get your whole point across. If you’re creating a graphic e-mail, it’s all about the subject line and the headline and visual in the graphic.
Whether you’re dealing with filers, pilers or dumpers, you’ve just got a few seconds to get your message through. After that, communication is over, and you (the sender) is bankrupt.
Posted by Alison Davis at June 1, 2010 06:36 AM
(Find me around the web)
