Demand Gen BizBlogging about the Demand Generation Business

I hear a lot about interruption marketing but I really have trouble with its definition, especially when it comes to emails. I can have a relationship with a company, subscribe to their email blasts, like their content – but when that email hits my inbox it still requires me to quickly scan it and see if it is worthy of a closer look. If it is, I then choose to either invest the time to review it now or later. If it isn’t I delete it, ignore it or maybe unsubscribe. I apply this same process to every email that hits my inbox whether the email is from a close or trusted friend or a seller of Viagra.® I am constantly “interrupted” by email, phone calls, door knocking, text messages, etc. etc. Interruption is simply part of my life and likely yours as well.

To try and reposition interruption we as Marketers believe that we need to first establish a relationship with the recipient of our emails. I have heard the argument that an email from a “trusted friend” gets your attention and that as a brand or a business we can create this trust with a recipient over time. The belief goes that once we have the trust our emails will be welcomed and our content happily consumed. Lets be honest here, a brand or a business is not a trusted friend no matter how long I have been on their subscriber list. People are friends, a dog is a friend, but Tide® is not my friend.

Perhaps the issue is not about interruption, but about relevance. At that moment I scan an email to see if it is worthy of a closer look, its content is what is going to get me to pay attention. If it’s relevant and meaningful to me then I deem it worthy, if not it gets ignored.

I recently wrote about the Google Grants program. You can read about it here. We decided to do a small experiment and sent out an email to 100 non-profit organizations. In the email we described the Google Grants program, how they can benefit and how our company is willing to provide some pro bono work. We didn’t have a relationship with any of these non-profits and they did not know our company. We got a 60% response rate. By any metric, a huge success.

Why did this happen? Because the message was incredibly meaningful and relevant to them. The majority of this group did not care if they never had a relationship with our company or the fact that they never subscribed. They responded because the message and the content had meaning and offered a solution to a problem common among their group.

Relevance and meaning for the recipient is the only thing that matters. As Marketers we think that sending an email without first getting permission is somehow an interruption and therefore wrong. But in fact if you take the time to really understand the challenges of your customers and have a real solution to their problems – go ahead and interrupt them.