More money or happier customers?
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 08, 2007
Here's an interesting email marketing dilemma posed by Kevin Hillstrom (found via Tamara Gielen's blog).
His basic question is this: if customers tell you they want less frequent emails, but you make more money from more frequent emails (based on a three-month test), what do you do? Read Kevin's post and contribute to the debate in his comments section!
I can argue both ways.
Perhaps the lower email frequency is more sustainable. The higher frequency may start to get poorer and poorer results as time goes by and people get fatigued, while the lower frequency will hold its performance much better. Three months isn't long enough to test that.
Equally, you could argue that purchases are another indirect form of customer feedback. As such, the higher frequency has also received a "positive vote" from the readership. An argument which might keep those in the "the customer should have control" camp happy.
In practice, of course, there is a middle-way where you give people the choice. Still, a question to get the brain firing at the start of another working week.
More on email frequency | Tags: email marketing, emailing frequency
His basic question is this: if customers tell you they want less frequent emails, but you make more money from more frequent emails (based on a three-month test), what do you do? Read Kevin's post and contribute to the debate in his comments section!
I can argue both ways.
Perhaps the lower email frequency is more sustainable. The higher frequency may start to get poorer and poorer results as time goes by and people get fatigued, while the lower frequency will hold its performance much better. Three months isn't long enough to test that.
Equally, you could argue that purchases are another indirect form of customer feedback. As such, the higher frequency has also received a "positive vote" from the readership. An argument which might keep those in the "the customer should have control" camp happy.
In practice, of course, there is a middle-way where you give people the choice. Still, a question to get the brain firing at the start of another working week.
More on email frequency | Tags: email marketing, emailing frequency
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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1 Comments:
Thanks for linking to the article, I appreciate it!
This is a classic problem. When I was at Lands' End, back in 1992, we asked our customers how many catalogs they wanted to receive. The customers wanted to receive 4-12 catalogs a year --- we were sending them 20-30 catalogs a year.
We tested respecting their wishes, and found that their spending decreased by more than fifty percent.
By 
Kevin Hillstrom, on
09 January, 2007
