I got 7 sales emails on Thanksgiving. Here’s what I learned.

We’ve written quite a bit about the power of email here at the Franchise Lead Generation Resource Center, but here’s an example where email’s ubiquity has an interesting implication.

For one reason or another, across the 6 email accounts that I keep an eye on (personal, main work, three auxiliary work, and one “team” account), I find myself on a LOT of email lists. I’m fairly loose with giving out my email address, and frankly, I like getting emails as it feels like I’m staying up to date on what’s going on in the tech world.

In any given day, I probably receive somewhere around 50 emails. The standard deviation of the number I receive is also fairly high, but 50 seems like around the right number.

If you were to ask me 10 days ago how many emails I was going to receive on Thanksgiving Day, I would have told you that it would have been fewer than 5. Maybe I would get a friend or two wishing me a happy Turkey Day and it was toward the end of the month, and you never know when that odd Delta Skymiles account report was going to show up.

What actually happened was downright shocking. Here’s a brief description of the 7 sales emails I received on Thanksgiving Day:

It took me a while to really figure out what was going on here, but after having a few days to digest it, I think there are a few takeaways that I’ve learned about how email works in 2014:

• Automated email programs don’t celebrate U.S. Federal Holidays – I know for a fact that a few of the emails above were part of a drip campaign that I’ve been on for a few weeks already. When the creator of those drip campaigns set them up, they didn’t have the option exclude holidays as they simply probably selected something like “7 Days later.” If that day happened to be Thanksgiving, so be it.
• If you think someone else isn’t going to send, then you should take advantage of the window – People have a limited attention span when it comes to email. There’s no substitute for short, concise copy. (I think it was Mark Twain who said “I was going to write a short email, but I didn’t have time.”) As a marketer, if you think that other marketers are going to take a day off from sending, then that’s a golden opportunity! Who cares if it’s a holiday? Maybe you’ll get lucky!
• There’s no substitute for being able to instantly message to someone’s pocket – People still carry their phones on Thanksgiving. In a world where all your e-mail is pushed directly to your pocket the second “send” is pressed, there’s no barriers to someone reading it like sitting at a computer. If Aunt Bertha’s monologue is boring you, then checking your email isn’t a bad alternative.
• Every single day on the calendar is commercializable via email – If you would have asked me to rank every single day in the U.S. calendar in terms of commercializability (that’s not a word, but you get what I mean), I would have had Thanksgiving either at the bottom of the list or second to last only to Christmas. I still think that ranking holds true, but it doesn’t mean that Thanksgiving is immune to marketing.

Understanding different, creative ways to use email could make or break a franchise’s development strategy. Want to talk about creative ways to get that done? Shoot us a note.