Does sending email more often mean more profit?

Kevin Hillstrom's concerned that focusing on ROI as a measure of success can lead you to make poor email judgments.

His latest take on this issue demonstrates how spending money on various email marketing tactics might see overall ROI from your email campaigns drop, but overall profits RISE.

One of those tactics is increasing mailing frequency. Common wisdom says you make more money as you up the frequency, until you reach a saturation point.

At that point, further increases in how often you send out email actually lower your profits, as ever more people opt-out (or tune out) of your email program.

I love Kevin's work and wish more email folk would take up his challenges. (Like Stephanie Miller, who suggests marketers be more circumspect about email ROI in this excellent blog post, which also examines the frequency issue).

Let me add some points to Kevin's and Stephanie's arguments about the value of investing in more emails...

1. Measuring the impact of frequency changes needs to take a long-term view. I can imagine an initial boost in sales which might not be sustainable over successive weeks and months.

If that's the case, then the frequency that produces the most profit will change over time. The "saturation point" will shift towards less frequent emails and you may find yourself eventually losing more than you gain if you stick to the "winning frequency" based on early results.

Very clever marketers will adjust frequency on a recipient-by-recipient basis to match their buying patterns. Something we do intuitively when we ramp up email frequency during the pre-Christmas shopping season, and then ramp it down again at quieter times of the year.

2. If the value of spending extra cash to send out more frequent emails is established, you still need to compare that value with other ways of using that cash. It may make more sense to invest the money in other marketing channels.

3. The effects of more frequent emails are not just on profits. It also changes the "email experience" and the perception of your brand. Not quite sure how (!), but it needs thinking about.

For example, Kevin himself has discussed the conflict between your subscribers' self-declared frequency preferences (as expressed in surveys or in sign-up forms) and the frequency that makes you the most money.

4. Today, I think the frequency versus profit curve looks like this:



This is because at some point, you irritate enough folk that the number of spam complaints passes a magic number which gets you onto one or more blocklists used by one or more ISPs or webmail services.

The result: a sudden drop in your ability to get emails through to recipients.

This is why increases in frequency have to be handled carefully.

OK, much of that is just my theory. So anybody with some numbers like to come and comment?

Related article: Calculating the cost of increased email frequency

More on frequency | Tags: email marketing, email frequency, roi

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