Email Marketing Strategy

Posted By emailadmin on April 9, 2009

This posting, we’re going to talk about the frequency of sending mailings.  What is frequency?  While it may be what you tune into on your radio dial, here we’re talking about how often a piece of your information shows up in someone’s inbox.  Some newsletters go out once a month, and others go out daily.  Alerts might only be sent out when there’s an emergency. How frequently should you send depends upon what your agreement was with the user when they signed up.  If you said they’d receive something from you occasionally, and you’re sending out emails every day, they’re going to unsubscribe and say you didn’t follow through with your commitment.  Losing a customers trust is never a good thing. There have been some recent articles stating that instead of just letting them unsubscribe, on the opt out page, you have a suggestion where they receive fewer mailings. People are using this more frequently.  Others request feedback as to why you’re unsubscribing.  Very few people fill these in. Ok, so you’ve got a clearly stated policy about how often you mail.  People have signed up.  What could the consultant do?  Data mine!    There is some wiggle room in the frequency best practice.  Unless you’ve clearly stated the day which you mail, you could try sending out the same mailing to subsets on different days to identify which has the best open and click through rate. The consultant can also review how well the information worked.  If you sent out  something you thought was thought provoking, and 10% unsubscribed, you’ll know that you can’t please everyone.

Checklist:

1. Make sure you have a clearly stated frequency policy on your sign-up page.  “Occasional” means different things to everyone.  You’re best bet is to be specific.
2. Have the consultant test days of the week and hours of the day to identify the best open and click through rate for your mailings.
3. Have the consultant review the unsubscribe vs. new subscriber rate.  If it’s regularly increasing, you may be fine with the unsubscribe rate.
4. Clearly tell the consultant how you’d like your statistics.  Do you want PowerPoint?  Excel spreadsheet?  Charts?  Conclusions or just raw data?

Prior posts in this series:

Working with Email Consultants Part 1

Working with Email Consultants Part 2

Categories: business model |
Tags: