Irritating a customer is worse than marketing budget wasted it’s potentially losing a customer. Companies that do this have no concept of timeliness let alone behavioral marketing. They give all direct marketers a bad name.
Cheap medium, plaster the world with a one size fits all appeal, tantamount to e-mail spam. It doesn’t even arise to the level of Sham-Wow or Snuggies. At least they were somewhat fun and targeted, late night low budget media buys notwithstanding. But, there’s design and forethought even there, people viewing tv in the middle of the night as a group are more susceptible, so you get that sort of infomercial, they want to belong, they’re bored and lonely as a group, so they pull out the card and call. Kind of like old folks and collectible kitkat, the direct response ads are almost always in the middle of the day if infomercial.
Those guys know what they’re doing. What you describe Walmart as doing is scattershot and borderline damaging. I’m surprised.
I was surprised, also, but have now been getting emails after going to a WalMart for about a month. And they're suggestions are usually nothing I'm interested in.
They also track what someone views on their site, then send emails making suggestions based on what someone viewed during previous visits. Those are a little closer to something I might be interested in, but still of no practical use.
Another online vendor now sends out emails if I put something in a 'basket', but don't order it. They send out "Forgot Something" emails, but I didn't forget and put something in the basket to consider the next time I actually place an order.
I think many online vendors and search engine folks are beginning to overdo it and they'll probably begin to experience some backlash because there is just too much of it now and more is being added all the time.