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In last week's post, we looked at Marshall McLuhan's statement "the medium is the message" and mulled how it could be applied to our favorite medium, email.

Savvy email marketers take the time to get their message "right." They test different headers and subject lines. They spell check, and proofread, and spell check again. They run SpamAssassin checks and use the results to lower their message's spam score. They perform audits to see how their message will render in different email clients or browsers, or on mobile devices.

But despite all these checks, their campaigns can still fall flat with recipients. Often, this happens because the marketer didn't fully appreciate the unique properties of their medium. Marketers should also examine whether the message of their campaign is consistent with the message of the medium they're using to transmit it. As illustration, I offer a counterexample from my own inbox:

When this message arrived with the subject line "KYMCO USA Introduces New Scooters and All-Terrain Vehicles for 2010‏," my first thought was not, "I simply must know more about these new scooters and ATVs!" Rather, it was, "Who the heck is KYMCO, and why are they spamming me?"

Sure, the email is well-crafted enough: pleasant graphics, lots of links, rendered properly in my client. But the effort of the marketer was overshadowed by the more powerful message of the medium. The power of email is that it is more personal than other forms of communication. And an effect of this power is that recipients take it's usage very personally.

To be clear, I'm a suburbanite with absolutely no use for a scooter or an all-terrain vehicle. So anyone sending a message like this obviously knows nothing about me. Moreover, I never gave permission for KYMCO to contact me via email. Therefore, I was about to hit the "Report Spam" button when I noticed that the sender of the message was familiar:

This email was sent by: Indianapolis Motor Speedway
4790 W 16th St. Indianapolis, IN, 46222-2573, USA

Well, that explains how KYMCO got my address. I'm a huge fan of IndyCar racing, and of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. So I had signed up for the IMS newsletter some months ago. I'm guessing they allowed KYMCO to "blast" their subscribers in exchange for a sweet deal on some ATVs or scooters.

If so, both parties made a bad deal. Had I viewed this advertisement in a race program, I might have lingered on it before turning the page. Had KYMCO been given a placement in the regular IMS email newsletter, I might have formed some positive associations between the two brands. But via the highly personal medium of email, I viewed it as an intrusion, an abuse of the permission I gave the Speedway to email me. What made them think it was OK to rent out our relationship to a 3rd party vendor? This was surely not the kind of introduction KYMCO was hoping for.

(As an aside, I hope the Speedway got a good bargain on those scooters, because I'm sure this mailing cost them subscribers. Unsubs and feedback loop complaints are the natural result when people get emails they don't want, and don't understand why they received them.)

No matter how much effort you put into crafting your email, if you misunderstand how the medium itself is perceived, you risk your message being as unwelcome as the telemarketer calling during dinner. Know your medium, or you could be sending the wrong message entirely.

Chris Broshears | Product Development