Email Marketing – Are eBay getting it right?!

Using my hotmail address as a general dumping ground for email marketing, I did my usual daily trawl last night to see if anything of interest had been sent through.

As is the norm there was a message from eBay, and I half heartedly opened it (they never interest me much). I woke up a bit when I saw that they’d gone for more personalised email marketing with a ‘Great Selection Tailored To You!’ title – and surprise, surprise they put in three items that I’d recently looked at. Clever-ish, except that as with Amazon, they so often send you these and although you may have browsed for them, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have an ongoing interest in them. Without stating the obvious it could be that you either looked for them on behalf of someone else or have since purchased the item.

Possibly picking up on the fact that the most recent item I’d viewed was an office chair, the next section contained… wait for it… Office Chairs, under the title ‘These are our most watched items…’. Nice approach.

As I scrolled down further, there were various general topics – which I bypassed.

But now for the best bit – and the main reason for my post. Rather than frustrate me with an email communication that contained products no longer relevant to me, eBay did a clever thing. And it’s so simple too. They asked if the products were relevant to me – genius. Ok, perhaps ‘genius’ is a bit of an exaggeration but it did mean that they maintained my customer satisfaction. Nice work. And something other email marketers should seriously consider.

Do you agree eBay’s method of rating the relevancy of emails is an effective way of maintaining customer satisfaction. Leave your comments below.