Best Practices
How often are you talking to your customers? Since it’s so easy to click that ‘Spam’ button, you need to be careful not to weigh down their in-boxes while at the same time keeping your company fresh in their mind.
I receive a wide variety of retail emails (part of my job, honest), and they can sometimes become daunting to sort through. Although I’m sure I’ve opted into more email campaigns than most consumers, the importance of frequency is blatant when I see 12 messages from Sender A, and only 2 from Sender B.
Sender A has already lost my interest by sending me too many messages – there’s no way every one of those emails is relevant to me so I just end up deleting them all with barely a second glance at the subject lines.
Sender B gains my trust, because they must have a good offer for me if they’re sending it (and not along with 10 other messages).
But What’s the Cut-Off?
There’s not a clear cut amount of emails to send, as each message has a different audience. Generally for my own campaigns, I send about two a month. It’s enough that your customers will probably open it when it comes their way, because they haven’t been bombarded by your offers for the past two weeks. Most companies send their email blasts on the first week of the month, so aim for the second and fourth week to stand out.
Certainly your analytics should also help guide you with this, and experiment to see when emails are opened (and if they still are when you send a lot). Soon you’ll see a trend, and that will help guide your important messages to the right in-boxes.
Great work. I’ve just started my own blog on email marketing and I’m still learning
Sweet, I was looking for something along the lines of this. I was thinking, do you think newsletters are still an way of marketing online? Does anybody still use them well and actually acquire readers?
Cheers!
Lauren
@Lauren: newsletters are still a great way to talk to your customers via email, but the lengthier they are the more opt-outs you’ll see. If you send one long one every couple of months, you’re in the clear, but you need to make sure you offer plenty of other stuff with your words.
Thanks for all the enthusiasm to offer such helpful information here.