Cardinals & Fanatics Go In Hard On Your Email Inbox

Alan Draper

Sports Editor

November 26 2016 3 min read

Email marketing strategies circa 2016 are varied.

Some (like The Ringer or Will Leitch) take a conversational approach, highlighting articles/podcasts that you might have missed during the week.

Others (like Basketball and Other Things) tease us with their greatness and then disappear into the darkness of night.

The Cardinals? Well, they really want us to know how magnanimous they are. Like really, really want us to know.

Maybe you decided to take it easy on the email this holiday weekend, so you might not have heard… so here’s a screengrab of my inbox that will get you back in the loop:

There’s an email subject author out there who’s heart is going to be real broken when they discover this newfangled thing called Amazon Prime.

The old adage about making it 20% about you and 80% about adding value to a consumer? It’s not out the window with the Cardinals, it’s locked into a box and shot to the moon. In a little over 2 days time, I’ve gotten 10 sale messages, including 8 with the exact same deal.

To be fair, this isn’t (totally) the Cardinals doing.

If you go to any other MLB team’s shop, you’ll see the same exact offer as you’ve been getting. For example, here’s the Tampa Bay Rays:

rays

In the upper right-hand corner, you’ll see it says ‘A Fanatics Experience’ under ‘Offical Online Shop’. That’s because Fanatics has signed a deal with MLB to be the exclusive online e-commerce provider of the league through 2033.

Part of that deal (I assume) was that each team turn over their email lists filled with people like you and me who wanted to be caught up on official communications about tickets, schedules, transactions and such.

Hell, I’m not even opposed to a good deal on Cards merchandise now and again.

But 10X sales messages in a skosh over days? SMH.

I bet there are Rays fans and Cubs fans and even Reds fans who are getting bombed with ‘20% off & free shipping’ messages too. So we’re not alone.

But if anyone happens to read this from the Cardinals, maybe pass along a note to your partners at Fanatics that we’re all adults here. If the deal is good… we’ll take a look. If we can’t take a look right away? We’ll save the email and get to it.

Cool?

I don’t think anyone wants to unsubscribe quite yet, but it’s on the radar. Let’s all be respectful of each other’s inboxes.

UPDATE (9:45p):

They’re just not going to let it go.