When Is CRM Pushing too Hard?

A competitor has recently been calling to pitch a new feature: Pop-ups when a customer opens one of your emails. This goes back to the Pounce, Pause, Nurture, or Wait? debate. The competitor seems to believe that the moment an email is opened is a good time to call the customer. I disagree for a few reasons.

First, if I were the customer I'd probably get freaked out. Just because I open an email from some random company doesn't mean I want to talk to them. If I did, I'd call them. That's the nature of email. Most times when I read through my email I am also prioritizing my day: weighing which email needs attention at what time. I'm a busy person and I don't like being interrupted - especially by an overly eager sales person.

Next, it's pretty presumptuous (at best) to say that the person who opened the email will be available to talk to you at all - for a variety of reasons. People check their email everywhere. In fact, we can literally say people "thumb through" their email much like they do with snail mail. If I'm on a train to work checking my email I probably am not in a position to talk about buying a mortgage. Likewise, if I'm at work and I sneak into my personal email account for a minute, the last thing I need is my personal cell phone ringing because of it. That is assuming, of course, that the sales person has a variety of phone numbers to reach me on.

Also, this feature really feeds an illusion to your sales staff: stop what you're doing and respond to this alert. While I do believe that there are times you should alert your sales staff of important things to do, I don't think that a customer opening an email is one of them. If your lead management system enforces a disciplined work flow your sales staff will always have enough to do while still seeing to it that your leads are followed up on and nurtured in a more thoughtful, less intrusive way.

If I were a sales person and I knew a customer opened my email I would do nothing out of the ordinary. Email is meant to be opened, read, and hopefully responded to. It's not a sign saying "call me now!" If i were a sales person using Sales Manager, I would rest assured that the customer who read my email will be presented to me at the appropriate time for a follow up call, or receive future emails via an automation campaign.