Marketing and Sales : Old data never dies
A marketing email shows something very interesting about the use of data in email marketing.
We are not going to identify the company concerned, nor the recipient because they are not the point of this article. What interested us about this case is a demonstration of how the internet has changed the face of direct marketing.
We all get mountains of spam: the reason for that is that the marginal cost of each email sent is as close to zero as it can get and still have any cost at all.
In 1999, the sales manager of a small company was investigating the use of the web for marketing. One of the channels he examined was the use of auction sites (of the eBay model but this case doesn't relate to eBay) for the sale of fixed price goods.
Think back: that was an innovative strategy. So was getting books listed at Amazon and the adoption of other fledgeling channels that are now so mainstream that life without them would seem odd.
The auction channel was discounted after registering an account and taking a good look around. So the account was left unused: no offers for sale or offers to purchase were ever made through it. Over time, the existence of the account was completely forgotten. At least, the sales manager of the small company forgot it.
But unlike a sick dog, data doesn't crawl away to die. It lies in some forgotten corner of a database until someone thinks it has a use.
So it was that the auction company sent one of those almost zero cost emails to the sales manager. It's not spam - it's the equivalent of targeted direct mail. But targeted direct mail costs several dollars per item to print, pack and post.
And just in case the mail is successful, there are instructions on how to recover the user name and password for the account.
Which, of course, is kind of worrying because after eight years who knows who is monitoring that email account within the company and whether that person might use the account for nefarious purposes having assumed, quite rightly, that the original user has no idea that it still exists?
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