The nurturing after a free trial for email marketing

We signed up for a free trial of a few email marketing web services in order to learn about the quality of service, ease of use and to learn.

Using email marketing systems

They all are very proud of their html templates, but these we don’t want to use as they look too much like commercial spam.
Reasons:
- In our view business people don’t like commercial looking html layouts
- In many cases the nice layout will not be presented in the email clients of companies.

Some of the email services convenient in use, several others are just difficult: from the upload of the contacts to the use of variables for the name of the contact in the email.
Although we are literate in information systems, in some cases we even didn’t manage to upload at all or it required support from the supplier.
Of course some went flawlessly and we managed to send out decent emails with a contact name.

The nurturing

What struck us most was the amount of nurturing emails one receives after signing-up for the free trial.

A few will report weekly about the status of your contact list and the number of subscribers which is convenient.
However some vendors send you an email everyday – even during weekends.
Is this still nurturing? It seems more like panic marketing or spam.

Some just send you one email a week on various topics like tips, which is probably better, but still we didn’t care.
The good thing is after about 6 weeks after sign-up the stream of nurturing emails seem to come to and end.
On the matter of tips: as most of the tips are so obvious, we don’t read them. Tips should be according to the level of the potential customer: the novice should receive a different kind of tips than the experienced email marketer.

Some also send a warning that your free trial is nearing its’ end, but why send this as we have used up the maximum amount of contacts already? Instead they should inform us that we should consider signing-up for a paid service.

Nurturing becomes spam

So we are wondering what drives these email marketing suppliers to send so many nurturing emails that aren’t nurturing at all, but mainly causing clutter in our inbox.
Just like spam emails, one ignores these email subject lines as there are many suppliers around and the differentiators are in the pricing.

Normally nurturing should make a potential customer happy, build a relationship and convince him of your quality of service.
Not getting him to a point of rejection.

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