How much email is too much?
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on February 22, 2007
Just wanted to point you to an interesting discussion over at the MarketingProfs.com forum.
The participants discuss how you judge the best frequency for your mailings. Lots of neat little ideas and insights buried within the postings.
Three things I would add:
1. If you have the clever tools, you might be sending different content to different segments of your address list. Same concept can be applied to email frequency. What's too much for one person might be too little for another.
There's a time and a place for a fixed frequency (I use one for my newsletter), but it might be helpful to get away from the "periodical publishing" approach and think instead in terms of how you deliver the right content to an individual at the right time.
Which relates to an article I mentioned yesterday.
2. Many people like to survey recipients to see their preferred frequency. Yep, the customer is in charge now. BUT...people's opinions and their actual actions don't necessarily match.
Most people would probably want less commercial email from you. But they might happily spend more money if you send more. So the survey approach gives you interesting information on subscriber preferences. But it doesn't tell you the whole story in terms of an optimal frequency. Testing does that. More on that issue here.
3. There's the issue of expectations, too. Your sign-up blurb and welcome message probably sets some form of expectation about how often you'll be mailing recipients. If you drift from that expectation, then you have a trust issue.
Plus anyone sending much more email than expected can expect to get accused of spamming at some point. Permission-based email marketing isn't just about the opt-in, it's also about keeping promises.
More on send frequency | Tags: email marketing, email frequency
The participants discuss how you judge the best frequency for your mailings. Lots of neat little ideas and insights buried within the postings.
Three things I would add:
1. If you have the clever tools, you might be sending different content to different segments of your address list. Same concept can be applied to email frequency. What's too much for one person might be too little for another.
There's a time and a place for a fixed frequency (I use one for my newsletter), but it might be helpful to get away from the "periodical publishing" approach and think instead in terms of how you deliver the right content to an individual at the right time.
Which relates to an article I mentioned yesterday.
2. Many people like to survey recipients to see their preferred frequency. Yep, the customer is in charge now. BUT...people's opinions and their actual actions don't necessarily match.
Most people would probably want less commercial email from you. But they might happily spend more money if you send more. So the survey approach gives you interesting information on subscriber preferences. But it doesn't tell you the whole story in terms of an optimal frequency. Testing does that. More on that issue here.
3. There's the issue of expectations, too. Your sign-up blurb and welcome message probably sets some form of expectation about how often you'll be mailing recipients. If you drift from that expectation, then you have a trust issue.
Plus anyone sending much more email than expected can expect to get accused of spamming at some point. Permission-based email marketing isn't just about the opt-in, it's also about keeping promises.
More on send frequency | Tags: email marketing, email frequency
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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