Mike May wrote a great post Tuesday about respecting your subscribers, and we found it inspirational here at Sailthru! He provided real life examples of disrespect, or a sense of entitlement, that at times can feel way too common in today’s society. Especially here in NYC, I imagine many of us have experienced that stark focus on our priorities – when you’re short on resources, long on commitments and buried in work, consideration for others can go by the wayside. I believe the vast majority of those doing email marketing want to connect and respect their subscribers, if for no other reason than it’s the right way to do business. And no, we don’t consider spammers to be part of this category – we don’t expect them to respect anyone. In his post, Mike lists several potential respect shortcomings in email marketing and then states that in just one week, 52% of the commercial emails he received contained one of them. The pitfalls range from hiding the subscribe link to swapping addresses from one owned brand to another. That kind of disregard for online customers makes our real world by comparison look a lot more like a polite society (that in my mind only exists in states with milder winters), doesn’t it? Our time is the one thing which we can truly call our own. Wasting someone’s time is a blatant example of disrespect for that person. Doing this doesn’t mean you are a bad person necessarily, it could just be that you are (for whatever reason) just being insensitive. Perhaps you just don’t know the person well enough to realize they don’t care about this week’s special on “fuzzy dice” for the car. Obviously, if I use public transportation this deal is irrelevant to me, but you won’t know that if you don’t know me, will you? As Mike points out, there should be more to an email marketing campaign than metrics. It’s about building relationships, and good relationships depend on knowing a person: being aware of their likes and dislikes, and respecting their boundaries. Marigold Engage by Sailthru email marketing helps you increase subscriber relevancy and engagement by helping you get to know your subscribers and what they consider relevant based on their actions and preferences. Our unique email marketing tools increase deliverability by using dynamic, real-time tracking. Marigold Engage by Sailthru respects your time by providing revolutionary email marketing tools which spare you the trouble of such things as hit and miss segmenting and setting up triggered campaigns. We respect your time by taking up less of it.