Simon’s Blog

No, not that bacon.  I mean “tech bacon”.   What is bacon?  You know what spam is (tech spam, not the product that claims to be made of pork) - it’s unsolicited garbage e-mail.  Well, bacon is solicited garbage e-mail.  You know the kind of thing: Check out this offer on Amazon.com; or Hi Dave, we noticed you haven’t used PayPal in a while, why not buy something today? Now, when you sign up to an on-line service, sometimes you’re sufficiently interested that you opt in to their e-mail “newsletters”.  Which is fine.  Or rather, it used to be fine.  Not any more. These kind of communications are becoming a problem.  I think it’s for a few reasons.

The first reason is this - people are simply using more and more on-line services.  Back in the days when people used only one on-line service, getting a newsletter once a month wasn’t a big deal.     However, this method of communication doesn’t scale.  If you sign up to thirty on-line services, and each service sends out a monthly newsletter, on average you’ll get a newsletter every day.  That’s too much bacon: you don’t have to sign up to many of these things before they start to become irritating.

It’s worse than that, though, because companies increasingly don’t seem able to contain their enthusiasm for sending out e-mails.    Quite a few services now send out automated e-mails once a week.  So, you can end up receiving several of these communications a day.

But wait, there’s more. The contents of these e-mails are becoming increasingly less interesting.   They don’t tend to tell you anything new.  Rather, they amount to nothing more than an invitation to go visit the company’s web-site and use the service.

So, it’s a problem… not only for consumers, but also for the companies that send out these e-mails.  Why?  Because with so much bacon coming into people’s inboxes,  I guarantee you that hardly anyone is now reading these messages.   E-mail newsletters might have worked a decade ago for building an engaged user-base for a product or service.  Not any more.