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What happened the last time you scored an email marketing home run? Maybe you tripled your open or conversion rate, or boosted the average order by 20%. What was the most likely response from your boss?
“Great! Let’s send it out again!”
It’s classic front-office thinking: A little is good, so a lot is even better. Unfortunately not, especially for email marketing. The research shows that over-mailing a list leads to apathy, unsubscribes or even spam reports.
Hitting the right frequency is a little bit art, a little bit science, and a whole lot of listening to and respecting the needs and wishes of your recipients.
But, it’s also a balancing act. On one hand, you don’t want to turn off your recipients by emailing too frequently. On the other, you need a permission grant that allows you to contact recipients between scheduled mailings without appearing to violate the original agreement.
In this article, I’ll lay out some of the principles that make email frequency a thornier issue than in traditional direct marketing and show you how to work out your own frequency equation.
Understand Who Controls Frequency (Hint: Not You)
Both email and postal direct marketers run the risk of alienating recipients by contacting them too frequently, leading to a condition called “list fatigue.”
But only in email marketing can list fatigue have a direct impact on the ability to get messages delivered.
After all, the Post Office is not going to penalize a catalog merchant if it sends a different book out every other day. (They’d love it, in fact.) Nobody but the local paper recycler will notice if catalogs or solo offers from a postal direct merchant get tossed before they ever make it into the house.
Not so for email marketers, and not so in a big way!
Research over the years is painting a clear picture of an email user who has become savvy at sorting the good email from the junk, at knowing what they want from email and how to deal with senders who don’t respect their inboxes.
- A holiday follow-up survey of email recipients in 2006 found 43.5% said they got much more holiday-shopping email than they anticipated. Over two-thirds said they deleted the unexpected email without opening, while a third reported the senders as spam to their ISPs, either in addition to deleting the messages or instead of deleting.
- A study we conducted with Lucid Marketing on email attitudes among mothers found these women had clear expectations about email frequency. Just over half preferred weekly or biweekly mailings, while a third wanted to be contacted monthly. Only 1 in 25 wanted daily mailings.
- A recent Pew Internet and American Society found that while Americans are generally less bothered by junk email than they used to be, they also are more actively to combat it, by deleting email or using spam filters provided by their companies, ISPs or email clients and others of their own design.
Still think you’re the one who sets the frequency schedule?
Choose Your Own Frequency
Frequency isn’t just a function of how often you want or need to send your messages. It must incorporate how often your recipients want to hear from you. Both are valid needs; how you balance them will determine whether your email program succeeds or flops.
Ask yourself this question: Do you send each email message because you have something new, urgent, timely or relevant to tell your recipients, or because you have to meet a publishing schedule?
Look around at your competition, too. I’m not telling you to slavishly follow the group; instead, you might be able to discern a trend that gives you a starting point to set your frequency ranges.
Now you’re ready to look at the factors that can help you set useful frequency parameters:
- Feedback. Are you paying attention to what your readers are telling you when they unsubscribe? (And yes, you should be asking this of each departing reader. For every 10 who will ignore an exit interview, one will respond with valuable comments.) They might be saying you send too much email, or too many irrelevant messages. Watch every mailbox associated with sending your messages, or comments people send by replying to your message.
- Market conditions. If you are a retailer, catalog merchant or other consumer marketer whose products are tied to the season, you will likely find yourself tempted to send more heavily during your busiest season. Or, you are in a business with a lot of flux -- floral, tourism, short-term discount shopping. These lend themselves to bulletin-style messages and justify more frequent contacts. But that can also backfire if you underestimate how often you want to send messages. It can be just as bad to contact your audience too infrequently as to mail too often.
- Preference center. This is where you test out your theories about frequency and see how your readers respond. Here you can give readers choices about how often they want to receive messages and what content they want. In general, the more relevant the messages you send, the more you can increase your email frequency. This will not work if your email marketing software doesn’t allow you to target mailings down to such a granular level. In that case, create different lists, maybe a general newsletter sent out weekly, biweekly or monthly, and a topic-specific bulletin sent out as needed. Promote each on the opt-in section of your preference section, and be sure to make it clear that each list has a different frequency.
- High-volume numbers. Special conditions exist for high-volume mailing lists, which by their very nature dictate that you send either daily or up to 5 times a week. Be very clear how many email messages recipients can expect. And, do what you can to collect information ahead of time so that your mailings can be as targeted and relevant as possible. Even though you make it clear that recipients can expect at least one email a day, it will look like overkill if what you send out is irrelevant to most of your list. If you find results are fading fast on your high-volume list, consider refining your parameters for it or adding a digest.
Respect Your Subscribers’ Choices
This is where the rubber hits the road for your readers. What do you do if you find an unbeatable bargain you just know your deal-of-the-week subscribers will fall all over, the day after you send your regular newsletter? Or if your sales manager needs to goose the monthly totals and urges you to send another mailing?
You need to keep your promise to your subscribers. Most of them might forgive one or two extra mailings, but you don’t know where the tipping point is that drives them to unsubscribe or report your email as spam. Instead of sneaking in another mailing, refine your list description that specifies a general number but allows you to reserve the right to send relevant messages between regular scheduled mailings. Specify a range of mailings in a given time rather than a specific number, but be as realistic in your expectations as you can.
Last Word: Beware of Under-mailing, Too
Most of the talk about frequency warns marketers against sending too frequently, but it’s also possible to send too infrequently to your list. You face different risks, but the end result can be the same. If you go for long periods of time without sending any messages, and then pop up with regular blasts around a holiday or other theme event, you may once again trigger unsubscribes or spam reports. Try not to let more than a month go by without contacting subscribers, either with regular content relevant to the list or with administrative requests, such as an invitation to fill out or update your preferences.
Resources:
More information to help you figure out and refine your frequency is available in our Resource Center. Start with these articles:
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