An energetic marketing department can conjure up dozens of online cross-marketing opportunities every month. Did you use the Web to buy a tent? Then surely you'd be a good candidate for lots of targeted email about camping getaways. Given that mass emails to customers are essentially free, it's tempting to deluge customers with promotional messages.
But smart marketers know that a profusion of pitches can be downright annoying--whether those pitches come in the form of emails or of telemarketing calls at dinnertime. "We try to limit our communications to one per month," says Sue deLeeuw, head of brand management at NextCard Inc., an online credit-card issuer in San Francisco. "That's about as much as people want to hear."
In the past year, otherwise well-respected Internet merchants like Amazon.com and CDNow.com have begun to strain customers' tolerance by pestering them with too many "special offers" that just aren't very special. DeLeeuw's advice: Focus on sending users pitches that are truly valuable and few in number. Beyond that, respect users' privacy and leave them alone.
Marketing mavericks like Fast Company columnist Seth Godin have argued for years that it's wasteful to beam a message to large masses of online users. Godin has advocated a "permission marketing" approach in which companies contact only users who demonstrate an interest in being courted. (See "Permission Marketing," April:May 1998.) So far, that's been a hard concept for most big companies to embrace. But more and more industry leaders contend that customer data should be made available to marketers only if customers say so.
"I've become a big believer in opt-in strategies," says Sandra England, president of PGP Security, a unit of Santa Clara, California-based Network Associates. "You get greater stability over your customer base. Instead of waiting to see who says no, you can create incentives for people to check the 'yes' box."
Of course, the opt-in approach has a downside. Companies that have experimented with it say that 10% to 40% of users choose to share their data--which is well below the 90% to 95% of users whose data typically becomes available through an opt-out approach. But a lower response rate isn't necessarily bad. If your goal is to sell a sophisticated product, such as a high-end computer server or microchip, then an opt-in strategy may be a good way to target the natural buyers of that item.
When it comes to privacy, consumers don't all want the same thing. A recent Harris Interactive-Wall Street Journal poll revealed an intriguing split in Internet users' attitudes toward privacy. Roughly one-quarter (24%) of respondents were "very concerned" about threats to their personal privacy on the Internet . But another quarter (27%) voiced little or no unease. (The rest fell somewhere in the middle.) That schism suggests that industry rivals may thrive by adopting contrasting privacy strategies.
A notable test case comes in the consumer market for Internet service. America Online greets its users with a cornucopia of marketing offers every time they log on to the service. Sure, AOL provides basic privacy safeguards, but if you're looking for seclusion on the Internet , this is not the service for you. By contrast, smaller ISPs don't attract nearly as much interest from marketers. So either by necessity or by design, companies like EarthLink are trying to woo users who want more privacy and less chatter.
It may take years to know which strategy works best, but either choice may be better than trying to occupy some ill-defined middle ground. The key is to calibrate your privacy policies to the privacy expectations of customers in your target market. In any case, it's much too soon to give up on the dream of using the Net to reach those customers.
George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior editor, is based in Silicon Valley.
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