Email Entropy is Important

People have a genius for detecting non-operational mail and email. We will not call it junk mail, because it is not always junk. But as humans, we have a unique ability to detect patterns that indicate if paper mail or email is not 'actionable'; that is, it is not urgent, important nor a response to a request. One of the purposes of good B2B email marketing is to get past these mental filters and have the reader actually look at the email to see if it is of value to them or not. If the value is too low to the reader, they are invited to unsubscribe in a CAN-SPAM compliant manner.

Low Entropy Email is the enemy of good intitial stage B2B marketing. Once we have engaged a new interested party we want to them to recognize email as coming from the right brand, but prior to the first indicated interest, it is normally much more effective to reduce the patterns that cause email to be identified as non-operational, and then filtered out - often at a loss to the recipient. Why would we say "... at a loss ..."? Because we have a large body of responders who replied to the 10th (plus) email sent to them saying " ... wish we had this solution sooner." Basically, their filtering of emails had caused them to miss a solution that they clearly wish they had at an earlier date.

Entropy?
In a simplistic sense, the word "entropy" means randomness-within-randomness. There is a more precise and rigorous defintion shown below, but for the non mathematically inclined, let's stick with the above. Essentially, we are trying to remove clues that make our email easy to classify as non-operational in order to get about 5 seconds of attention. If we write the body of a B2B email well, that is all it takes for the reader to decide "Yes" or "No" on further time investment.

The hallmarks of low entropy email (A.K.A. "Worst Practices")

• Send email from an organization, not a person
• Send email with a consistent look and feel - "brand early and often"
• Email with a prefix in the subject line such as "Free Online Webinar:"
• Write email content with a marketing tone and point of view
• Mention your product in the first sentence
• Introduce the reader to new jargon
• Confuse your messaging with the reader's job

A little more rigor ...
Entropy related to statistical randomness essentially means that in a data set with allowed states, there is an equal probability for each next state:


where is the total possible individual sub states. The entropy is


The equation is not obscure or irrelvant - in fact, it is carved on Ludwig Boltzmann's tombstone. It is however, awkward in the application of B2B marketing. S in the equation has maxima where is maximal. In the degenerate case where Omega has a value of 1, then S is 0 and there is no randomness. The 'awkward' part for B2B marketing comes with M.A.S. platforms that are easiest to implement with an Omega value of 1 or 2. (i.e., build a few pretty emails and send them every time to everyone.)