The Snooze

No, not Costanza sleeping under his desk.

Rather, Oracle is talking about pausing email campaigns to customers who don't want them for a period of time (click here).

Some email vendors (not the one referenced above) will tell you that you absolutely cannot allow unsubs to happen, because you "lose all of the revenue" from that customer going forward. That statement "lose all of the revenue" is inaccurate for several reasons.

1. Email marketing typically represents a minority of customer spend among customers most "engaged" with email marketing. The best companies generate 50% of revenue from email marketing among email subscribers ... most companies are between 5% and 20% among subscribers. So you are not losing all of the revenue, you are losing the amount attributed to email marketing.
2. We don't attribute sales to email marketing properly. Some companies hold out email campaigns for a month among email subscribers and learn that 30% or more of the volume generated by email marketing still happens when email campaigns are not executed. Email cannibalizes other channels, take email marketing away and sales increase in other channels as a consequence.

Let's review a common situation. Email subscribers spend 20% of their volume via email marketing, and if you take email marketing away, 30% of the 20% still happens in other channels, meaning that 86% of customer spend still happens in total among email subscribers. In other words, if the customer unsubs, you might still expect 86% of customer spend to still happen.

This means that the concept of "snoozing" email subs upon their request is reasonable for keeping the customer on your subscriber list and is reasonable from a "maintaining sales levels" standpoint.

Win / Win!!