I love Mark Morford's Morning Fix. I never read it on the web - I've always had it emailed to me. When I first subscribed to his morning fix, he covered interesting things that I found I liked - his take on the top stories, an article about something he was thinking about, responses to letters people wrote to him, copies of hate mail he got, strange and wonderful historical facts about San Francisco, haiku's and links to some of the most interesting stuff on the web. His writings are not mainstream. They are probably considered liberal, somewhat pornographic, irreverent, highly political and just plain rude. I think his stuff is genius. He is a wonderful thinker and questions the social reality we are fed by mainstream media. He is a culture jammer.
Why does this matter? It doesn't. What matters is that I used to get his morning fix in my mailbox and I loved it. It was one of the highlights of my week (3 times a week) when I was working for the corporate devil. The Chronicle has since slashed the fix and the interesting thing is... I don't read it that often anymore - and you know what - I don't read the SF Gate website either - which I had started doing when I was actively reading the Fix. This is a case study in how to do email marketing WRONG. Let's break down the situation and put it in business terms.
You have HeatherVescent - a subscriber to Mark Morford's Morning Fix - an opinion column on SF Gate's website. SF Gate is the web version of The San Francisco Chronicle. The morning fix is emailed to her with a variety of content including Mark's full length opinion article. Heather really enjoys reading the fix - not only the opinion article, but also the other information. She doesn't always have time to read the whole email, but she does almost always (90%) of the time open it up. She notices that sometimes there is a picture with the Fix - but you can only see the picture from the SF Gate website. There are also top stories that Mark has rewritten that link back to the SF Gate website. She often clicks on one of the links and is taken to the SF Gate article online. She finds she likes reading the stories online and more often than not, spends more time looking at other articles online. She starts to poke around in other areas that are interesting to her such as Tech and Business and reads articles in those areas. She adds SFGate to her list of quick book marks and puts it as her homepage on her home computer. Before too long, Heather is checking into SF gate almost everyday and reading stories. She likes SF Gate and enjoys going to the website. She checks it several times a day to see the top stories changing. She likes getting the fix, looks forward to it several times a week and checks the SF Gate site regularly.
Time goes by and there is a lapse in the email Fix - NO EXPLANATION - and then Heather starts getting HTML formatted emails with the first 2 or 3 paragraphs of Mark's opinion column and a link to his story on the SF Gate website. None of the other stuff that used to be in the fix is there. Heather continues getting the fix. She opens the email and sees that the whole article is not there - this frustrates her. (The formatting has been changed without her permission or even notice - change is BAD.) For a while she clicks on through to the SF Gate website to read the article - but it really is a hassle. To read the article takes time - if a web browser is not popped, one has to be launched and with the bloated NS 7.2 or hefty IE it takes some time before the browser is popped and it takes a lot of computer resources. If a browser is not popped it often steals a window with some other webpage that Heather feels is important enough to leave open. This is frustrating because she will have to open up another web browser manually (it doesn't always work when it pops a new browser window) or will have to navigate back to the previous page in the web browser before my email client passed the URL.
Heather decides this is just too much work to read the fix. "The fix is something fun that I take a moment in my day to read - I don't want it to interfere with my work." Since the format changed Heather has stopped going to the SF Gate site (the links that drove her to the site are no longer included the email). She's doesn't read the fix that often anymore and she's even stopped opening the email.
I want to want to read the fix. I love the content Mark writes - I don't always agree with his views, but it's a still a free country. But come on, Chron/SF Gate - you ruined a good thing. Really. Mark's email newsletter, the way it originally was, had successfully transitioned me from a consumer who never read SFGate.com to someone who checked out the site several times a day. (Pay attention: you were making money on my clickthroughs via your display ads). And look at my attitude now: I have a negative attitude about the site and I feel angry. Something I really enjoyed was changed to something more difficult - because YOU wanted me to go to your site. You are FORCING me to go to your site to read content I could get in my email. And I won't do it, no matter how much I like the content. It's asking too much from me as a consumer/reader. I used to go to SF Gate all the time, but it was because I WANTED to go there, not because I am being FORCED to go there.
I hope email marketers are paying attention. It's true, you can get further with honey than vinegar and it works in the online world too.
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