This is the key sentence of your post: "Email can be a viable and effective marketing medium, but the more email users get that they really didn’t want, the less effective it will be for everyone."

it's the classic tragedy of the commons, marketing-style; there's some tiny (but nearly worthless benefit) for everybody to push the definitions of opt-in a little bit, but the result of everyone taking from the commons of consumer trust is that the commons is destroyed, and everybody loses. I think we're actually past the point of no return with email, but I can see similar things happening in social media and effectively undoing their benefits.

Here's the "logic":

If we manufacture messaging that increases our odds of sending emails it increases the odds of people opting-into our offers.

Here's the reality:

If we manufacture messaging that increases our odds of sending emails to people who didn't want it in the first place we tick them off...and, sooner or later, a competitor will leverage that angst to give customers peace of mind that they won't use this faulty, desperate logic and will actually take better care of them.

Thanks for a great piece, Cam. Do hope that BoA sees this.

Cam,

We have been doing our banking online for years through TD Northbank, and have experienced no such problems. Perhaps Bank of America's online program isn't as progessive as your wife was led to believe.

Cam,

We have been doing our banking online for years through TD Banknorth, and have experienced no such problems. Perhaps Bank of America's online program isn't as progessive as your wife was led to believe.

The sad thing is, they probably think they're being clever, when in reality, they're just annoying customers and abusing their trust.

John and CK - You have it exactly right. The action is motivated by fear and desperation, but the net effect is harmful to the entire medium.

Lewis - I have no problem whatsoever with the online program, necessarily, but their online marketing efforts. I get the feeling that essentially what they're asking for is permission to use the data they're collecting about my financial habits to serve relevant email marketing... Problem is, I don't want their steenking marketing. They have to confuse and misdirect in order to gain permission to do that, which is troubling.

Anne - Precisely. Makes me wonder what they've been smoking to believe this is acceptable behavior. ;)

Cam,

My point was made poorly I guess. TD Banknorth has never asked us for anything other than our bank numbers. There is no apparent marketing effort and I have never received any TD Banknorth marketing in the decade I have been with them.

Lewis - Does that include junk mail/credit offers?

Yes, everything. Other than my bank statements, I don't receive and junk mail or SPAM. I remember back in the '80s BOA had a terrible reputation as a brand that doesn't care much about its non-business customers. And when my former bank was taken over by BOA, service became so bad, I changed banks.

Perhaps BOA is a bank that thinks about sales and marketing first and its customer relations not at all.

This is not the tragedy of the commons it actually directly hurts Bank of America directly. Why would it benefit them to send to people who don't want their emails? It is better to send to people who want them for the individual company and the individual.

I bet you BOA pisses off a lot of people with this kind of thing.

Cam,

You are probably right, this can be traced to incentives. If conversions were the metric, you would be less likely to see this sort of thing. If just numbers of people on list are the metrics, then you have smoke and mirrors.

John, on second thought, this is tragedy of the commons. In the classic example, the individual hurt both themselves *and* the group by pushing the limits. In this case BOA hurts their own reputation, pisses off customers, and trammels the medium all in one foul swoop. Nice.

Lewis - I'm not inclined to think any more poorly of BOA than I do of any other organization that engages in this behavior.

Unfortunately, that sets the
bar pretty low. There are a lot of them... but for the record I do my very best to change the tide. :)

We don't have TD Banknorth down here in the deep south that I know of.

Neil - Yesterday I talked to a friend of mine who said he experienced the same thing I did, on the same website, right before I posted the article.

It's strange... As I said, people are so accustomed to being treated this way that they made up their own workaround for being asked for senseless data. Their first instinct was to put in false information, but the companies started requiring activation codes that were emailed to the account users provided.

BugMeNot.com came along, which allowed people to sign in using someone else's information.

I know the companies can devise more effective methods to ensure they're getting correct information, but IMO, they'd be better served spending all that energy creating content people want and figuring out how to give them something of value that makes legitimate use of what information they'd like to have in return.

I am hardly a power user of Google Docs and I don't doubt Office has a ton of functionality that Google doesn't.

Enni

Very good article, i would like to put it into my page, can I ??