Frequency caps are critical

When different parts of the business are sending out email, there's a danger that a customer can get driven to email fatigue by repeated communications from your company.

So your carefully planned schedule of marketing emails is thrown out of kilter by the zealous sales rep or the exuberant order fulfillment folk.

That's why centralization is a hot topic.

A recent Email Marketing Voodoo post reminds us that the same problem can arise if you split your list into lots of segments. If someone falls into too many of those segments, they end up getting too much email from you.

The Voodoo solution is to prioritize and rotate your emails on a regular basis.

Other alternative solutions I've seen are:

1. Space out emails so that three weekly emails each arrive two days apart rather than all on the same day.

The problem there is that there may be times of the week that really rock in terms of response, and you don't want to miss the window of opportunity just to space out your emails. Plus it's still a pretty intensive emailing regime for the recipient.

2.Amalgamate emails into one, with the priority segment as the main message and the other segments as cross-selling messages.

So if someone signs up for deals on garden tools, kitchenware and toys, they get a garden tools email with promotions for kitchenware and toys in a sidebar.

More on targeting and frequency | Tags: email marketing, segmentation, email frequency

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