How to Clean Your Inbox and Drive Marketers Crazy

Email Marketing by Bill Rice

If you want a tool to keep your Inbox cleaner, try this. Create an email filtering rule that looks for these phrases, "privacy policy", "webinar", "webcast", or "unsubscribe" and move these emails to a separate folder. I call is the "Noise" folder. You'll be amazed how many marketing emails get pushed out of your Inbox with this simple filter allowing you to focus on the emails that really matter. I look at the Noise folder once a day for any relevant messages or to enhance the filter.

I'm not the first one to make this suggestion and here is a step by step guide from Wired.

That's not the only approach to battling digital marketers who are trying to grab your attention. There is the Inbox Zero approach to email management with many tricks published to achieve this objective. See here, here and here. There is also the new GMail enhancement that was rolled out last year, automatically separating your email to two new tabs, "Social" and "Promotions". Guess where most digital marketing email goes?

Why The War on Email?

Many of us are 100% digital now. Get on a commuter train and count the number of people reading iphones and ipads versus the numbers looking at newspapers, magazines, and even laptops. Some of us are reading books, websites, and twitter streams while others are playing the latest games featured in the Apple or Android app store.

Many of us will be distracted when the email alert announces a new mail and some of us will stop what we're doing to switch to the email app to review. And many of these emails fall into the category of marketing emails or newsletters which might be important, but not worth distracting us from what we were doing.

And the same thing happens at the office. Your name ends up on a marketing list, the emails come in, and you can't keep up with clicking all those Unsubscribe links for every new marketer that wants to reach you.

The Growing Challenge in Digital Marketing

Every company requires some investment in marketing to reach customers and digital marketers are facing increased competition and technological challenges for your attention. They will experiment with segmentation, message timing, subject header authoring, design and other mechanics to improve their odds that you will open, click, and action.

And how do you improve your odds? How does a marketer increase their chances that their marketing efforts will beat out competition and yield results?

Become more data driven. That's table stakes for marketers playing the game of reaching customers digitally.