Bacn Marketing: too much of a good thing?

Did you know that more than 2 billion pounds of bacon is produced in the U.S. each year? That equates to approximately 32 billion pieces of bacon being consumed last year alone. But is it too much? Can you really have too much of this delightful meat stuff that even vegetarians love? Thankfully we will be leaving that conundrum up to the experts because today we are actually talking about Bacn, not Bacon.

When it comes to email marketing, everyone knows what spam is but there is a new term that email marketers need to add to their dictionaries, bacn. According to Mashable, bacn (or BACON) is defined as “the more legitimate cousin of spam. The big difference, though, is that bacon is something you ask for. Good examples of bacon include Google News updates, Facebook notifications and Groupon deals.”

So why should this new pork based email nomenclature matter to marketers? First, in 2010 online retailers earned $26 billion dollars from bulk emails. Second, chances are your subscribers are getting overwhelmed to the point that more than 8 out of every 10 legitimate emails are being deleted, marked as spam or unsubscribed from. This second reason presents a serious problem when you have worked hard to cultivate a legitimate email list. And it is only getting worse, just check out the infograph from unsubscribe.com found below (click to view full size).

The solution… a balanced diet. As with its delicious edible namesake, all things are best in moderation. Instead of overfeeding your customer’s inboxes with just a huge slab of bacn, mix it up with tweets, status updates and direct mail. By incorporating a healthy mix your subscribers will appreciate each piece so much more.

Bon Appetite!

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