Inadequate send frequency is one of the biggest marketing sins that ruins email campaigns. As much as 73% of unsubscribed users declare that they opted out because they received too many messages.
Does the problem affect ypur company? Below we help diagnose and solve it.
10 Commandments of Email Marketing. Download Free Ebook
When you send too many emails
When you send too many bulk emails, you expose yourself to several risks. Firstly, you might be marked as spam, what will hurt your campaigns deliverability in a long run.
Secondly, it affects relationships with your customers. Flooding them with messages leads to:
- marking your messages as spam
- opting out
- “emotional opting out” when users don’t actually unsubscribe from your list, but they don’t open your messages and don’t expect to find anything interesting in them.
How to know if I send too many messages?
If you send bulk messages more often that 3 times a week, you might be at risk. Check out 3 metrics:
- Unsubscription rate: if it’s high (1% per campaign or more) and people massively opt out from your list, it’s high time to change your strategy
- Open Rate: does your audience open your messages and read them?
- Contact activity: what percent of your base actively reads your messages, visits the website and buys?
If you have an impressive list but your contact don’t respond to your messages and opt out often, revise your strategy.
2-5 messages per month
- 2015 DMA study shows how often marketers contact their customers.
- 35% of companies send 2-3 messages per month
- 21% of companies send 4-5 messages per month
- 9% of companies send 6-8 messages per month
- 8% of companies send more than 8 messages per mont.
(source: Smart Insights)
What seems striking? We send more emails than we used to in previous years. Marketers apply “less is more” principle and prefer to put more effort in tailoring the message content and time of delivery to individual user’s preferences instead of blasting the whole list with the same offer.
Dynamic emails take over the scene
Today we address less and fewer messages to all our contacts. Thanks to Marketing Automation systems we know more about the customers than ever before. We collect the data that helps us personalize communication. Instead of sending one recipient 5 messages, we prefer to send 1 that is relevant.
An example of such philosophy is dynamic emails (messages that are triggered by a defined event). In the system we set rules that send an email automatical emails when:
- someone viewed a product but didn’t buy it -> we send an offer of a product she viewed and similar ones
- someone put products in the shopping cart but didn’t finalize the transaction -> we remind about products waiting in the cart
- the user hasn’t been active in a long time -> we reactivate her with a special offer (like a discount)
- the user has a birthday -> along with the best wishes we deliver a small gift, like a free delivery on that day
The great thing about dynamic emails is that we don’t create them manually for each user – we just create a template and set a rule, and the system does the rest itself – when the conditions are met (for example, the user viewed the product), the message is sent. It means less work for you and more relevant messages for your customers (they are offered the products they’re interested in or get the messages that resonate with their current situation.)
Contact segmentation
Even if you send a bulk campaign, you don’t have to send it to the whole base. You can address it to a group of contact, for example:
- to loyal customers
- to contacts who haven’t made their first purchase yet
- to inhabitants of a given area (if your campaign is location-sensitive)
- to people who are interested in particular products or product categories
- to people of a given gender.
That way your messages stay relevant, so it’s more likely that users will open them.
To sum up: how to reduce the number of emails sent wisely?
If you suspect that too high send frequency damages the efficiency of your email marketing, try these 4 fixed:
- Test lower frequency. Choose a group of contact that will get fewer emails and keep a control group that will receive the regular number of messages.
- Consider sending emails at various frequency to different segments. For example, less active users can get fewer messages, and loyal and active ones – more.
- Give your audience an option to choose how many messages they get, for example, in welcome message or on the landing page they see after clicking the opt out link.
- Try to include more dynamic emails and segmentation in your communication. Before you send a campaign, ask, “To whom is it addressed? Who will find it useful and who will not?” Maybe that particular campaign will be attractive to loyal customers or to people who bought something before, so there is no point to send it to everyone?
And you?
How many emails do you send? Are they bulk messages or rather dynamic ones?
Follow
