As opt-out rates increase, we look at the implications.
It’s well-known that ordinary people (aka “consumers”) increasingly use tools like pop-up blockers and PVRs, like Tivo, to avoid advertising. This has led us to focus on changes in the advertising industry more than some of its less glamorous cousins, like direct marketing or sales promotion.
But it seems that UK magazine publishers are also experiencing “soaring” opt out rates by subscribers – of up to 70%. In other words, when someone subscribes to a magazine, they tick that little box that doesn’t allow the magazine to send them marketing messages from the mag itself, sister titles or the good old “carefully vetted third parties” – a euphemism for anyone who wants to mail you and has the dosh to pay them.
Now admittedly, when I read the word “soaring” my PR-speak radar clicks on and sure enough, there’s a consultancy behind the news who wants to advise publishers on how to reverse this trend. But that doesn’t mean to say that the claim isn’t true, by any means.
The fact is that people are turning away in droves from all forms of traditional marketing and it seems to be unravelling much quicker than you’d have thought.
People are simply fed up with being marketing AT and are savvy enough these days to understand that they don’t have to put up with it. They opt out of lists, join organisations like The Telephone Preference Service and The Mailing Preference Service (and their country-specific equivalents) and use technology, like browsers with pop-up blockers.
Of course, that doesn’t stop idiots (I won’t name them, as I won’t give them the bandwidth) from inventing pop-ups that get round pop-up blockers, which is completely missing the point. If I install a pop-up blocker and some tosser thrusts an ad in my face anyway, do they seriously think I’m going to go “D’oh…that’s an interesting product I must go and spend all my net worth on one of those”. Clue: actually, I’ll be mildly annoyed and make a mental note never to buy the product EVER.
MobHappy readers know that the new form of marketing is about engaging your actual and potential customers in a dialogue. While traditional advertising isn’t a very good channel for this, traditional direct marketing is – or should be. So that’s why it’s a terrible indictment of the magazine industry that they’ve had their chance to engage and blown it.
And the really scary thing is that when a customer opts out of your marketing dialogue, it’s terminal – the end of that relationship. The one thing you are specifically forbidden to do in the future is to ask for a second chance. So even if you suddenly convert to brilliant engagement marketing dialogue, you’ve lost the right to apply it to that customer for ever.
OK, there’s a chance that they might come back at some point, but how likely do you think it is that a customer who has opted out of a marketing dialogue will feel strongly enough at some point in the future to track you down and consent to opt in again?
Stranger things do happen, like eBay buying Skype for silly money. But I wouldn’t bank on it.
There’s also a lesson here for the new mobile channel gradually emerging from its pupae. Marketers need to be thinking long and hard now about how they’re going to use the channel and how they can convince customers that their brand is worthy of their attention. Trying to pump pap down the mobile isn’t going to hack it and will simply lead to more “soaring”.
However, it’s even more challenging than that, these days. You can’t rely on customers giving you the benefit of the doubt with your proposed marketing programmes. You have to convince them at the outset that a dialogue with your brand will be one they’ll enjoy and benefit from.
Ask not what the customer can do for your brand, but what your brand can do for your customer.
Image from the BBC – I’m not suggesting that they suffer from declining opt in rates or nuffink.
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