The case against “data-driven” email marketing…

As I was shaving my beard today, a realization flicked right into my cerebral cortex:

I have stopped using Gillette razors.

It’s actually been a while – almost a year – since I switched to this really great beard trimmer…

But for some reason, it took until today for me to notice how I’ll probably never use the standard Gillette razor ever again…

Now I made that decision purely out of pragmatism…

But a lot of their (former) customers didn’t.

They deliberately stopped using their razors – heck, even downright vowing NEVER to use them again…

Because of that god-awful ad campaign they ran in 2019.

You can read a lot about it online so I won’t go into it, but a quick TL;DR:

• Someone very „bright“ decided it would be a great idea to portray their core customers (traditional men who valued family and national pride) as bullies, misogynists and sexual harassers….

(That’s probably what you get when you hire a fire-breathing feminist to spearhead your entire campaign.)

• Within 48 hours they collected 400k dislikes on YouTube – making it one of the most disliked ads in YT history…
• (Former) customers started posting videos of themselves throwing Gillette razors in the bin…
• 6 months later, P&G (their parent company) announced an $8 Billion writedown on the Gillette brand…
• The CEO doubled down – in response to the backlash – by saying „it was a price worth paying.“

Why did he think it was ‘a price worth paying’?

Because apparently…

Their website traffic spiked to the highest level in five years… the brand got millions of mentions across social media… and overall „awareness“ increased.

But spreadsheet merchants – like that CEO – miss something critical in episodes like these…

Awareness ≠ purchases.

While 77% of their viewers felt „hopeful“ about the future of the brand…

…ONLY 34% of them said it made them want to purchase a Gillette blade.

(Not to mention, that the entire campaign’s audience was 51% female…)

The older I get the more I notice just HOW many CEOs, directors, founders…

…over a long enough time, forget what the main purpose of a business is:

To make money.

Yes you need awareness for that, you need marketing you need all that shebang…

But the problem is when you get TOO caught up in the soft metrics – you forget what your only „North Star“ metric is at the end of the day:

How much you sold.

This especially frustrates me when it comes to email marketing/email marketers…

They get caught up so much in open rates… click-through rates… unsubscribes…

…that they forget for what purpose they’re even doing email marketing:

To ultimately drive more SALES.

(Although you don’t do it by just sending people blatant sales pitches of emails… sure that can work, but it’s about as efficient as government agencies.)

An 11B/year publicly traded company – Ulta Beauty – had this to say about email’s purpose in their official 10-K reports:

„A growing percentage of our marketing expense is being directed toward email marketing… Ulta’s email marketing programs are effective in communicating with online and retail customers and driving sales…“

There’s a great book out there – on this topic of the danger of relying too much on metrics, data and being overly “data-driven” – called “The Tyranny of Metrics”.

(I forget the author’s name, just Google it.)

I recommend a read.