Diary of a Marketing Insight Guy

Recent personal experience and a story relayed by a client have prompted reflection on how to deal with marketing email activity that goes wrong. (Some readers of this blog may even have been unwitting participants in the former incident themselves!)

Launching a new online data capture solution, my own company planned a series of emails outlining the benefits of the service, each email highlighting a different aspect. Unfortunately, in preparing the second in the email series, the first email was accidentally resent to the same recipients that had already received it originally. Not once, but twice!

Now, had it been resent just once (this was ten days after the first email), we might have quietly delayed the second execution and pretended it was a deliberate “follow-up”. Those recipients that opened it would probably this was the case (which was the plan, it was just supposed to be a different message). But having sent two emails, ten minutes apart, we didn’t think that would wash. The question we asked ourselves was should send an apology (adding a third email to our beleaguered and much valued recipients’ in-boxes)? Doing so might be appreciated by those wondering why they were receiving so many emails from us, but equally might exacerbate the issue with others. Still more people, who might not even have noticed the resends, would have their attention drawn to it.

In the end, we decided to send the apology. It’s obviously exceedingly embarrassing when situations like this arise, reflecting badly on our competence in an area which is meant to be a core skill. However, we thought that honesty was the best approach and indeed in our email we referred to the debate we’d had before taking action. We also invited feedback on whether we’d done the right thing, and of the responses we received, the overwhelming majority agreed with our approach, with only one or two saying we’d made the situation worse!

Separately, a client was recently forced to take action after a member of his sales force sent an email blast, utilising Word and Outlook to undertake a “mail merge”, rather than using the company’s approved email broadcast facilities. This DIY approach, breaking just about every rule in the email marketing book from poor targeting to contravening anti-spam legislation, resulted in a complaint from a recipient to various executives, copying the the US Federal Trade Commission (not a career enhancing outcome for the sales guy!). The original email was also criticised for not making clear the nature of its commercial content (as required by relevant legislation). All in, the transgressions could have attracted $11,000 in fines, and the complainant also demanded that no further email be sent, not just to him, but his entire company, and that there would be no prospect of doing business with them.

My client’s (rapid) response was to write back, apologising for the incident, making various assurances about some specifics of what had happened but above all assuring him that lessons would be learned. The response? An appreciative reply, stating that, after all, their services would be considered in the future.

The outcome of all of this is that honesty is certainly the best approach to dealing with issues when they arise. Whilst the complaint made by the recipient of my client’s email that the subject line was misleading was arguably unfounded, it highlights the importance of not trying to obfuscate the intent of a piece of communications. And although we garnered some criticism for our apology, most people who replied appreciated the gesture. True, the naysayers in some cases aired suspicion over a publicity seeking conspiracy on our part, but it’s worth bearing in mind the old adage of never attributing to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity!

Adherence to process though is equally crucial to avoiding issues in the first place. In our case, a more rigorous approach to separating the subsequent executions of our campaign would have avoided the problem. Had my client’s sales rep used the email system supplied for him, there would be proper provision for issues such as unsubscribe handling, opt-out suppressions and sender identification.

Learning from our mistakes is of course another important lesson - but learning from other people’s is even better, so I hope this post has been useful!

Over coffee with a client’s VP of Marketing last month, we came up with an idea for customising (or customizing!) subject lines in email marketing. It’s well known that subject lines are a key determinant of open rates and every good campaign should involve the testing of different variations to establish which one  performs best. Considerations often revolve around personalisation or length (with regards to whether shorter or longer is better), but we got to thinking that quirky or straight might also have an effect.

Some people, we concluded, might quite enjoy an email subject like “Have lunch on us whilst we talk about our stuff!”, whereas others may prefer a more serious tone along the lines of “Learn the benefits of our products over lunch”. This could be tested over a sequence of campaign executions and the individual open rate for each recipient recorded to see whether they tended to respond better to one type of line or another. This implied preference could then be recorded within the email or marketing database and utilised as a customisation parameter in future activity.

Of course any number of other factors could influence an individual’s open rate so ongoing monitoring and adjustment would be needed to ensure peak effectiveness. Just an idea though, and I set it free here for your consideration. If you give it a go, let me know how you get on!

It’s well known that Sales and Marketing are the cats and dogs of many companies (or dogs and cats, I’m not trying to start a debate about which is which in this post!), constantly fighting with each other and falling out. But what about Marketing and IT? Technology is crucial to most marketers and we turn to our IT colleagues for solutions to help us manage customer lifecycle, campaign execution and many other aspects of marketing activities. Alongside systems deemed business critical in finance and operations though, Marketing is often de-prioritised and left to fend for itself.

IT’s response to requests from Marketing for additional resource often revolves around their need to focus on “core functions”, but what are these functions? Clearly IT has many demands placed on it from across any business. Systems relating to financial management and service delivery will always occupy a high profile position, against those merely generating and tracking demand for a company’s products and services. The tendency among IT organisations is to want to retain ownership of as much as possible, define everything as a project and then submit every initiative to a review board for approval.

Marketing’s requirements are often much simpler than this, and the rising prevalence of hosted and software-as-a-service solutions mean these needs can be met in a much lighter-touch way. IT’s role then becomes that of creating an environment where these solutions can be rapidly selected and deployed, undertaking integration (often only a configuration task) where necessary. Core IT skills such as requirements definition, vendor assessment and selection and project management are still invaluable, but they are relieved of the heavy lifting of creating the environment for a new system and handling the fine detail of implementation.

Clearly the arguments in favour of outsourcing are well rehearsed, but Sales and Marketing represent a particularly good fit for this approach. IT’s “core function” can then become enablement, and the growing contingent of highly capable, technically literate marketing operations professionals can take it from there. There’s no reason that Marketing and IT can’t play nicely; now how to achieve the same result with Sales…

Couldn’t resist sharing a hoary old customer relationship management horror story, at the expense of Virgin Atlantic, which is of passing relevance to this blog.

Having secured a piece of work which required me to travel to New York, I decided to eschew my decade-old allegiance to British Airways and give Virgin a try. Some people rave about Virgin and I’ve heard less glowing reports too, but I guess there’s no substitute to trying it for yourself.

On buying the flight, I naturally signed up for their “air miles” loyalty scheme, “Virgin Flying Club”, in order to start accruing my meagre rewards. (I’m not flying up front or traveling that often!) A few weeks later, a mailer arrived in the post (very nicely done, I will say), encouraging me to sign-up to Flying Club in exchange for instant Silver status (the next level after Red, the starting grade.) My first thought, of course, was the slight breakdown in customer data management that had occurred, allowing an already-signed up customer to be sent such a mailer, giving away additional benefits.

Nonetheless, instant Silver status seemed worth having (just) so I visited the campaign microsite to sign-up, with a strong feeling that somewhere along the line Virgin would realise their mistake. Sure, enough, having submitted my details, the process rejected my application with a (rather cryptic) message along the lines “you’re already registered”. No doubt I could have obfuscated my details sufficiently to fool the system, but at this point I was loosing interest. Instead I fired an email to Virgin Customer Services, identifying myself and complaining that I wasn’t able to complete the application.

Back came a response (over ten days later) asking me to identify the email I had received with the offer. Well, the offer came by post of course, so I replied to this effect and queried why they didn’t appear to know what they had sent me? In the next reply (another ten days after mine), I was asked to identify the mailer, with no acknowledgement to my point about joined up marketing. By this time I had mislaid the mailer, so I offered a short description and again made the point that somebody at Virgin must be able to establish what I had been sent.

At this point, I was informed in the next reply (this time a little more promptly), that my enquiry was “referred to the relevant team”, who noted the applicable offer was both mailed and emailed. Regardless, I would now be upgraded to Silver and a new membership card despatched. Splendid, I thought, since the up-rated status came with free upgrades to First Class on the Heathrow Express, my favoured method of transfer to the airport. I’ll use that next week when I go back over to New York…

So, a few days before my most recent flight, I thought I’d take a look at how to claim my free upgrade. Logging into my Flying Club account I hunted for a link to booking a ticket - to no avail. So, off went another email to customer services, enquiring as to how I obtained my complimentary upgrade. The reply (received overnight, they’re getting better!) advised me to use the upgrade vouchers in my membership pack. “Um, what membership pack?” I thought, and emailed back along those lines, adding that I would be traveling in the following week. Predictably I received no reply, so I resorted to calling to see if there was some way of expediting the fabled vouchers. This was now the day of travel, so I held out little hope, and sure enough there was nothing that could be done. And my mischievous efforts to secure a flight upgrade in lieu of a train one also didn’t work!

The key lesson here, of course, is to ensure that customer mailings always utilise the most up to date information possible. There will always be a delay between list extract and mailing, especially/particularly with postal direct mail, but there’s no excuse for these being more than a few days. Don’t let your mailing house tell you they need a week to prepare the data once they receive it (especially in a recurring fulfillment process). The gap between my original Flying Club registration and the mailer I received was well in excess of this, probably by weeks, so it was more than possible that I might have registered in the meantime.

The other comment I would make, specifically in relation to Virgin, is that the childish tone of voice in their marketing communications, website etc is completely at odds with their apparent desire to be taken seriously as a business airline. When I receive breathless emails enquiring as to my level of excitement at my forthcoming flight, my actual reaction is to begin mental preparations for spending another seven hours in an economy class seat! And fulfillment processes that work on a monthly schedule (as it turns out is the case with Flying Club membership packs) is again futile for customers with a more frequent purchase history.

Processes, as well as messages, need to be tailored to the intended audience. I think my next flight will be with BA…

Commencing an engagement earlier in the summer with a company for which I had previously worked, I was issued with an Exchange account for internal communications whilst on-site. Not surprisingly, my external email address was the same as it had been when I was employed there, since it adopted a standard format comprising my first and surname together with the company’s domain. What did surprise me though, eighteen months after leaving the company, was the steady stream of emails I began to receive from lists to which I had been subscribed before I left.

Now perhaps I should have diligently ensured, before moving on, that I had unsubscribed from these lists or informed their senders of my change of address. The reality though is that this is often harder than it seems, between keeping track of the lists to which you have subscribed and knowing how to advise your new details. It’s usually not the highest priority when moving on either.

These emails sent to my old address would certainly have been bouncing back to the originator for quite some time. The failure, or conscious decision, by these senders not to process these bounces and use them as an opportunity to update their databases is astonishing. Across the entirety of their databases and subscriber lists, given the rate of decay of business data, these senders must experience significant volumes of email delivery failures.

Just as with spam, it’s tempting to dismiss such considerations on the grounds that the cost of continuing to send to dead addresses is minimal, the effort of doing something about it substantial and the overall impact negligible. This is not the case however, and persisting in sending to bounced addresses can lead to deliverability issues and represents a missed opportunity for database management.

Repeatedly sending to non-existent addresses and incurring the bounce back messages this generates gets noticed and can lead to being placed on spam offender lists. This could cause all email to be blocked by spam filters with obvious dire consequences for campaign effectiveness. You may not even know that here is a problem, except for the rather disappointing response rates.

Failing to update marketing databases with bounced addresses also means that the opportunity to track the fact that the record itself may be invalid is also lost. If other activity is being driven from the database, such as DM, then significant cost can be incurred sending to contacts who are no longer there. Acting on email bounces also offers the opportunity to proactively update the database. If an individual represented a high value contact (someone in a senior position or a frequent purchaser), perhaps it’s worth a call to establish where they’ve moved in order to re-establish contact or identify a replacement?

I’m not complaining that I’m receiving some of these emails again, and it may even be to some of the senders’ benefit in the end. But the likelihood of this situation arising is tiny and the potential negative impact significant. There’s no excuse for bad practice.

We’ve run many marketing automation projects over the years, both large and small. Here’s a simplified version of the methodology we use, and some hints around getting your project up and running!

1. Project Feasibility - an informal review to scope the potential project and set some expectations. This process might be no more than a short internal meeting, but at this stage you’ll not only be able to roughly size the project, but you’ll also have a good handle on the costs you’re currently incurring. Look at the organisation’s current levels of marketing activity, not only in departments carrying out marketing, but also Sales and other functions. Try and come up with some metrics such as spend (internal, number of activities, overall number of touches), and the programme objectives; customer acquisition, retention, up-sell/cross-sell. Don’t forget softer marketing activities such as newsletters sent by product or customer service groups.

You also need to get a rough idea of the data available, again don’t forget to look out-side the main marketing teams as well as internally. This usually means Sales, Finance (if there is no data warehouse), Customer Services and product management teams.

Add into the mix your organisation’s future needs, growth strategies, new products, desired improvement in customer experiences, structural acquisitions, as well as any predictable internal factors around people or structural changes.

Activity + Costs + Data Resource + Business Objectives are the inputs you’ll need do outline the project scope.

2. Initiate Project - you might have an internal project initiation process or it might be a more informal set of actions. But any successful project will need most of these components in place:

• Business Buy-in - Your project is going to need or catalyse change in your business. Now is the time to get your directors or SVP’s on board. And don’t forget to keep up a dialogue with the guys in IT!
• Project Champion (Board) - Someone with a stake in the project’s success and with enough political weight to fight your corner for resource and support
• Project Manager - A good PM combines a detailed technical understanding with the oleaginous charm of a diplomat and the motivational skills of Madame Whiplash! They can be either from marketing or from IT or both! At times it’s going to be a full time job, so make sure they have the bandwidth.
• Success Definition - Develop meaningful indicators of success; these might include  reduction in costs, improvement in productivity or trends in conversion costs. Keep them simple (at least what you share with the business) and realistic.

3. 1st Stage Requirements Definition and Data Audit Documentation

• A high quality piece of work at this stage is vital to the success of the project; investment in time here will be repaid by a successful implementation many fold. When you start writing the cheques is too late to be finding  figure out that what is being delivered doesn’t meet your needs.
• Clearly prioritise all key features; essential/desirable/optional. On any requirements document the nice-to-haves tend to take up the same amount of space as the need-to-haves.
• Think about phasing; its likely any substantial project will be delivered (and paid for) in a number of stages; prioritise key deliverables, but you also need to work out the optimum structure to meet operational constraints.
• Identify any internal process changes needed, this is another area that is easy to overlook or underestimate. Does this need to be a vendor deliverable or can the business handle it themselves?
• The Data Aaudit doesn’t need to be exhaustive at this stage; but you need to have a very good handle on the inputs the system will need, files layouts where applicable, approximate record quantities, and source system dependencies. In any complex organisation it’s easy to underestimate the number of data sources needed for build and production. On one recent project the estimate was 18. The real number once an exhaustive process was complete? 61!

4. RFI/RFP to vendors (and internal Technology Group) - You may or may not have an internal IT resource who feel they can deliver a Marketing automation/CM project. One way to cut through the politics of this is to ask them to respond like the other vendors – make sure they price internal IT resources realistically.

5. Response evaluation and contract negotiation

• Allow plenty of time for this stage; there’s nothing like seeing the figures on the table to focus the mind, and the vendor will be looking to safeguard their position. A successful negotiation will allow both parties to apportion the risk
• Usually there will be a significant up-front cost for development. A guaranteed contract term will allow the vendor to amortise the development costs over the the period of the contract.

6. Project Plan and Timeline setting - Make this realistic but not too long. You need to be able to keep the momentum going, but its not great to forever be announcing delays. Try and structure the project to allow early wins; for example you may not need every single data feed to start gaining value from a single customer view.

7. Detailed Requirements and Data discovery

• This should be straightforward process if you’ve got a good requirements price, but the vendor should respond to your functional prioritisation, allowing you to make informed choices before agreeing the statement of work.
• Allow plenty of engagement time for Data discovery. You’ve probably lived with this data for a long period of time, but any external consultant or specialist is starting from scratch. You’ll also have to make knowledgeable internal data specialists available to the vendor; if you’ve got complete documentation on all internal systems and feeds, congratulations – that’s a first!

8. Development – Ensure configuration and customisation adhere to the agreed requirements and specification, without suffering from scope-creep (constant additions to the original functionality). Any such development should be minimised and every process or function scrutinised to gauge its real priority and whether “out of the box” functionality will suffice. Conduct regular review sessions with key stakeholders to demonstrate functionality and ensure it is on track.

9. Implementation and migration – Develop data migration and cut-over alongside functional development. Ensuring the right data is available in the new system from day one is critical and users will be unforgiving if it is not. Many CRM implementations fail due to data issues, including data quality. Will you migrate all data from legacy systems, or apply rules and filters? What is the data model of the new system compared to previous ones, will there need to be a mapping process.

10. Training ‘Go-Live’ – Don’t overlook training and plan well in advance of go-live. Avoid the temptation to just let users loose on a new system and learn it for themselves, but develop a proper training programme, with hands-on usage (even if it’s a late beta version) and plenty of exercises and review sessions. Aim to have training deliverables available (documentation, process guides or screen tutorials). Run post go-live sessions to re-cap key functions and answer any questions on general functionality arising as users start utilising the system.

11. Evaluation and On-going development – Conduct reviews to ensure the system is delivering the required functionality. Survey users for their opinion on usability, how much they’re using the system and any key missing functions. Does it make their job easier? Put aside resources to make enhancements post go-live – don’t expect the job t complete at this stage.

Ardent readers of Database Marketing magazine may have spotted my letter regarding data acquisition published in the June issue and I thought it worthwhile expanding on the topic here. I had written in response to an article in the May issue concerning the availability of business universe databases, such as Thompson Local or Corpdata. I made the  point that whilst the focus always appears to be on the number of companies available in such databases, be it 1.8 million records at Thompson Local or Corpdata’s 1.2 million, less attention is paid to the availability of individual contact names.

Establishing the businesses that exist within the UK (or elsewhere), particularly at the medium/large end of the spectrum, is relatively straightforward. Incorporated companies in the UK are registered with Companies House, whilst in France all trading entities must register with the authorities. This data is a matter of record, and the suppliers mentioned above aggregate and enhance it to create business universes which can be rented or purchased. Identifying smaller business can certainly be more challenging, although databases such as Information Arts‘ Business DNA in the UK do exist.

At the larger-organisation end of the spectrum though, databases and lists are invariably made available with contact names consisting of the “officers” of the company (directors registered with Companies House in the UK for instance) and perhaps other senior executives. Other data sources have more specific contact names among IT, finance or marketing decision makers, and specialist lists (particularly publishers’) may enable selection from a wide range of job functions and responsibilities.

However, these selections frequently do not go far enough in terms of their granularity, and tend to offer merely “key decision makers” or “most senior decision maker”, which are usually hopeless. I’ve been involved in activity recently involving IT decision makers with responsibility for “application infrastructure” or a specific and somewhat obscure software platform, to whom we were promoting high end enterprise software solutions. When list suppliers contact me trying to sell their database of “4 million UK companies with named IT managers”, I’m underwhelmed.

My message to data owners then is, make sure you understand your target market’s requirements and don’t try offering generic lists when more specific data is required. Trying to impress potential customers with big numbers based on the count of companies in your database will backfire, and suggesting inappropriate contact roles will destroy your credibility.

Equally, if you’re procuring data, don’t be taken in by claims of database size and how many contacts you are being offered. Dig into the detail and ask what size the organisations are, what is the seniority of the contacts and what are the specifics of their roles. Don’t despair however, as even if pre-built lists or existing databases don’t exist, there are cost effective methods of building databases to your requirements.

This is the message for data users though: if you want quality data, you must accept that there is a cost associated, and it may not be instantly available either. An investment of time and money though, along with strong creative and proposition, will be rewarded.

Spent a very interesting morning at the Silverpop B2B Masterclass in London yesterday. Hitting just the right balance of education and solution selling, there were some interesting presentations and good ideas. I thought it would be worth picking out a few in particular from the opening presentation by  Silverpop VP Will Schnabel. You can view the complete slideset on Slideshare, but here are some highlights.

• Marketing extends further into the pipeline - in the past, potential customers would pick up the phone and ask for a sales rep to come round to explain your products. Now, the savvy purchaser reviews your products online, reads whitepapers and case studies, seeks references and gains an understanding of your product sector. These are all areas where Marketing is now required to deliver, so that by the time Sales are called in, the prospect is in a much more advanced stage of the purchase cycle. As such, Marketing must rise to this challenge and fulfill an education and sales preparation role, ahead of an actual buying conversation. Crucially, this also means “plugging the leaky funnel”, where prospects fall out before they get to the point of Sales engagement due to poor materials and general lead management.
• Data capture - take web visitors through a sequence of data gathering steps rather than a one-off capture of everything you can think to ask. Responders will be turned off by very long forms with lots of questions, so ask for additional information at every interaction to build up a picture. It was suggested in the session that there probably isn’t a magic number of fields or forms to optimise this process - it may be unique to your business - so some experimentation may be required. And on the subject of data capture, don’t allow yourself to be locked into backend data processing requirements (such as field layouts), if it doesn’t suit the information you actually need. Also, consider utilising data capture techniques, the likes of which I’ve written about previously.
• Lead scoring - this is a key element of lead qualification, using various criteria to determine the value of a lead and the appropriate next steps. These criteria can be grouped into three areas: demographic (contact role, type of organisation etc), “BANT” or the actual position of a prospect to buy, and activity (website downloads, event attendees, information requests). These techniques should be built into an overall lead scoring mechanism appropriate for your business to judge what is passed to Sales, and what remains within Marketing for ongoing nurturing.
• Lead maturity model - a useful way to assess your own lead management sophistication, this four stage model suggests the areas that should be addressed for best practice lead management. Incorporating both demand generation activity itself, together with lead handling, it’s a valuable benchmark for your own activities. (Take a look at the slides for more details.)

In all, a worthwhile morning aimed at helping marketing secure one outcome in particular - “revenue velocity”, or increasing the rate at which an initial lead is converted to a sale, which must rank as a top priority for all marketers.

I wanted to briefly mention a great new resource for anyone involved in online data collection, brought to us by international data quality and addressing guru, Graham Rhind. “Better data quality from your web form” is a free download ebook in pdf format that is designed to help achieve effective international name and address Internet data collection. In the spirit of full disclosure I should mention that Graham asked me to take a look at the book before he published it and as such I can say it’s an invaluable source of information.

Exhibiting Graham’s customary thorough and comprehensive coverage of the topic, the book includes guidance on name and address capture, use of pick-lists and other form elements, usability and data validation. Longe-standing readers of my blog will know that web forms are something of a hot topic for me and I hope this book will help curb some of the worst examples of bad practice out there!

The book is available for download from Graham’s site, and whilst you’re there you should take a look at the wealth of additional information he makes available.

A point raised at the IDM Emerging Digital Trends seminar the week before last, a recent conversation and an article in the April issue of Database Marketing magazine all highlighted an issue I thought worth recounting here.

Presenting on the use of web analytics, David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling at John Lewis talked about customer segmentation and tailoring communications based on behaviour and purchase history. He made the observation that by creating such segments, messaging content and frequency could be tailored appropriately to recipients, increasing relevance and effectiveness.

Separately, I was speaking to the former head of database marketing at a US Mid-Western publishing company. He recounted the tale of having finally made inroads with his marketing campaigns colleagues in persuading them to adopt a segmentation strategy. This was aimed at helping to reduce the over-touch problems they were facing, where some individuals were receiving as many as one email per day, such was their volume of activity. This of course lead to drastically falling response rates, as the blizzard of email simply went ignored. (Interestingly, even opt-out rates weren’t that high, such was the level of disengagement among recipients). “We need to improve targeting and reduce touch volume”, said my exasperated contact.
“No problem,” came the response, “we’ll just stop emailing the bottom, least valuable segment - that should cut volume by 10%!” The observation that this would make no difference to the top segment (those receiving an email a day), went unheeded…

In his piece in Database Marketing, Warwick Beresford-Jones wrote about “optimisation”, making the point that a given individual can be contacted only so many times before they become unresponsive, and that those touches should be used wisely to achieve best value. “Without optimisation, your best customers are generally over-contacted and you second and third best customers are under-contacted,” states Beresford-Jones. “There is a point in the year when you actually start to annoy your best customers and this impacts directly on campaign profitability.”

Back at the IDM seminar, David Walmsley highlighted this temptation of sending “one extra” email to the top segment when the weekly sales numbers aren’t quite reaching target. I asked him how this temptation should be avoided. “It takes discipline,” suggested Walmsley, adding that taking a short term approach ultimately leads to lost value within your customer base. How should this discipline be engendered though, and in particular how can pressure from senior management in tough trading conditions be resisted?

The answer, as Beresford-Jones amply illustrates in his article, is to have the numbers to hand to support your case. This means being able to demonstrate the return from a given piece of activity and ideally the campaign cost savings made by reducing segment sizes whilst maintaining targeting focus. Point to falling response rates (and opt-out rates where appropriate) as evidence that contact fatigue has set in.

The ease of executing online communications is such that over-touching, even with the best of intentions, is all too easy. Even the pushiest retail sales person would be unlikely to follow you around the store asking every few steps whether you wanted to buy something (certainly not at John Lewis!). Yet that’s what our customers’ inboxes can feel like at times. A little discipline never did anyone any harm and this is no exception.