If I had a pound for every time a client asked “Are we emailing our customers too much?” I would be a very rich man.  However, if I had a pound for every time a client asked if we were sending too much direct mail or are we broadcasting our TV or radio adverts too much then my bank balance would be no different.

Did the marketing team behind the infuriatingly more-ish Go Compare campaign debate whether their adverts were being shown too much during peak times?  I very much doubt it.  On New Years’ Eve 2008 did Pepsi worry that they were going a little over the top when they launched their new logo with a week-long ‘promotional extravaganza’ in Times Square.  Of course they didn’t.  So why do email marketers continually question their strategy when it comes to frequency and volume?

Well, one of the major reasons is we don’t want to be portrayed as email “spammers”.  But in my view, we have a tendency to let this concern have too much influence on our strategy.  Don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s fantastic that we question our tactics around frequency and show our customers sensitivity when it comes to their inboxes but in my view we can go a little too far and become a little too sensitive.  At the end of the day these customers have requested that we email them, they have opted in.   So, I would suggest that it would have to be an extreme set of circumstances for an opted in customer to go to the trouble of reporting a retailer for over emailing them!

Surely it’s about content and not volume

For me, I think the question is less about frequency and volume and more about value and relevance.  If you’re sending your customer a rich and varied programme of activity and each of your emails are relevant and adds value to the customer’s brand experience then I would suggest that that the topic of frequency isn’t at all important; apart from the fact that you might not be sending enough!

However, if you’re sending emails that add no value to a customer’s brand experience then you will undoubtedly risk a negative action from your customer such as an unsubscription or spam report.  However, this action will be due to a lack of content rather than the number of communications that you have sent.

So what’s your optimum frequency?

So now you’ve ensured that your emails are rich in content and are as relevant as they can be.  How can you be sure that your email plan is hitting its optimum level?  As you may have anticipated, I’m afraid there isn’t a one size fits all solution as every programme will be different.  So I would thoroughly recommend that you invest some time and resource into finding what your “sweet spot” might be, as you could be leaving money on the table.  (However, before conducting any testing around frequency it’s always best to contact the ESPs to inform them of your intentions and your commitment to best practice).

I was very fortunate recently to have attended MarketingSherpa’s email conference in Miami and came across a great case study that detailed how a large US based ecommerce company went about establishing their optimum email frequency.

This ecommerce business who sends more than one billion emails per year divided their most motivated and loyal segment into 7 groups, as detailed to the right.

As you may have expected the volume of customers unsubscribing from the programme did increase as we moved through the segments, but this was expected as they were giving customers more opportunity to unsubscribe.  The crucial finding was the unsubscribe rate actually fell on a per-message basis.

As you see from the diagram below, they never actually reached the point of diminishing returns.  By going from 4 email messages per month to 15 per month they tripled their projected monthly revenue without any significant negative impact to unsubscribe or open rates.  In actual fact, when they were sending one email per week this company was missing three times the amount of revenue it could have been making if sending every other day.

Although I’m sure the marketing department who implemented this test would have been very pleased with themselves and indeed the test result.  I think it is important to highlight that this test only lasted 60 days and we don’t know whether this positive trend continued over time.

The brand awareness card

Ok, so you’ve created a rich and varied email programme and you’ve found your email ‘sweet spot’, so what now?  Well in theory, you should be reaping the rewards.  However, what do you do if you experience a downward trend?   Well, what you must not do is panic and make rash decisions.  Don’t forget even if your customer hasn’t interacted with an email for a while it doesn’t necessarily mean that your’ ‘subject header’ hasn’t been absorbed.  There’s no immediate need to re-think your frequency strategy or content, don’t forget that customers may still be taking in your brand name and indeed subject header.

Nice guys don’t finish first

So the next time you’re in a situation where you’re discussing the performance of your email programme and someone suggests that you should consider reducing the number of emails that you send; please remind that person that you’re in the business of selling so why on earth would you want to reduce the number of customer contacts that you make with people who have taken the time and effort to ask you to email them?

It is far more important to invest time and resource into ensuring that your email programme delivers variety, value and relevance than it is to look at frequency and volume.  In actual fact, if you’re delivering an email programme that delivers a rich and varied inbox to its customers then the subject of frequency should never really enter into your mindset, unless it’s regarding increasing the frequency!  As why would you want to reduce the revenue that you generate from your email programme by reducing the number of messages that you send?  It just doesn’t make commercial sense!

Tags: Advertising, Digital Agency, Direct Marketing Agency in Manchester, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Agency, Email Marketing Frequency, Email Marketing Relevancy, Email Marketing ROI, Email Marketing Strategy, Email Spammers, Go Compare, Manchester Marketing Agency, Marketing Agency, Marketing Sherpa, Online Marketing Agency, Pepsi, PPC Agency, Radio, Relevancy, Retail Marketing, SEO Company, Times Square, TV, Value Added Content

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Blog, E-mail Marketing, Email, Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.