Last night I heard an NPR piece about a publishing company called Twelve that only publishes 12 books a year . Six of their 9 books so far have become best sellers. Jonathan Karp, the man behind Twelve, explained that by only publishing one book per month (in a world that publishes 33 books every hour of every day of the year), they can really focus on an author and his or her book, to edit it, shape it, and publicize it.

Earlier that day, I attended an email marketing conference in Seattle put on by StrongMail. According to analyst Julie Katz of Forrester, the first presenter, 77% of consumers say they get too many email offers and promos. And 72% delete the emails without reading them. Why? In my opinion, it’s the publishing equivalent of 33 books published every hour: Marketers just keep sending out emails, believing quantity will win out over quality, which leads to lots of duds and only a few best sellers.

Consumer trust of email has gone down dramatically as a result. And that’s bad for everyone.

There’s a lesson here for marketers: If you target more selectively and send to fewer people—those more likely to respond--your response rates will go up and your boss will be happier with you.

And your copywriter can do a better job. No matter how well written your email marketing is, no matter how hard your copywriter tries, if you’re sending out too many emails to too many people who don’t care, all your copywriter’s hard work is simply being deleted.

Go to www.strongmail.com to download the Jupiter Research report “The Maturation of Email."