Thoughts on all those pesky marketing emails: some good things about them

Every morning when I wake up, one of the first things I do is to open my Gmail inbox to check emails. I’m greeted by about 20+ marketing emails every morning. Many of them I unsubscribed already, but the ones I haven’t, I didn’t unsubscribe because they’re still the brands and services that I care about (eg. REI, The New Yorker) and sometimes I need their emails for transactional purposes (eg. Uber ride confirmation).

Of all the marketing emails, I hardly read any of them and just archive them. It feels like a cleaning routine like sweeping leaves off of my porch every morning (I actually don’t do this very often though lol). One morning, after engaging in this Sisyphean task, it occurred to me that I will probably not be able to be free from these marketing emails for the rest of my life. It occured to me though, that there’s gotta be a way to reframe this situation to look on the bright side and use it to my advantage.

Here are a few good things that I consider we all can make the most out of:

• A sense of being welcomed: All the marketing emails are written in super friendly tones. It becomes harder and harder to get good services anywhere, especially in restaurants or retails stores. (A side note: I wat at Best Buy the other day and one of the workers there was horrible and just plain rude, didn’t make me want to go back there ever again) At least all these marketing emails are very nice to us, saying nice things (of course to entice us to buy thing from them), but even all these fake hospitality is still hospitality. I think they still create positive emotions in our minds and do some good things to our mental health, even though just a little bit. It all adds up over years and decades. Kudos to all the content writers coming up with positive greetings and cheers for the emails.
• Exposure to latest design and content trends: These marketing emails are at the forefront of latest trends, otherwise they wouldn’t get attention and the email open rate will suffer. A lot of the email subjects are quite click-baity but still makes me look, open and read. There are some great examples I felt like they’re a masterclass of catching the readers’ attention. Same for the visual design, I learned quite a lot from some of the emails’ layout, color to set the tone, call-to-action to make sure the readers click the button rather than just hitting the Back button. I haven’t got around to using some of these design techniques that I observed in the marketing emails in my day-to-day work communications but I’d like to some time.
• They make the important emails stand out (ie. Figure/Ground theory): As this famous theory from Gestalt psychology suggests, a figure (the main content) can only stand out when it has a ground it can sit on, that’s how our mind works. When we browse the inbox, we subconsciously treat these marketing emails as background and actively scan for the important messages that we’ve waited for anticipated. I always felt like the important emails pop from the rest and that made me glad and appreciate receiving those relevant messages as opposed to all the rest of the emails.

This refraiming exercise was a great proof that almost any negative experiences can be reframed and we can garner positive implications from them. I still don’t like receiving way too many marketing emails, but now that it became a routine and it’ll probably be like this for the rest of my life, I’m glad I don’t feel as bad as I used to about these emails.