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The Right Voice and Frequency for Different Segments

All subscribers are not created equal and the profit you can expect to make across your subscriber base varies. Segmentation allows a business to allocate its resources where they will have the greatest payoff. Understanding the lifecycle stage of subscribers on your email list means you can make intelligent decisions about whom to email, what offer to send, and how often to do so.

Even your most loyal brand ambassadors aren't going to be interested in every email you send out and if you continue to send every email to every subscriber, you'll lose your audience.

Continually Engaging Your Brand Ambassadors - Your most active brand ambassadors - those customers that are most familiar with your brand and knowledgeable about your offerings - are more expectant and accepting of messages that go beyond marketing and clearly indicate you understand their interests and want to develop a relationship with them.

Invitations to sponsored events and special promotions on products or services that enhance previous purchases are in line with this group. Offers that align with their previous purchasing history show that you understand them and appreciate them as loyal customers.

In the same way, educational messages that provide tips and tricks to help these loyal customers use your product or service in more efficient ways also help to strengthen the relationship and can be considered a form of customer care.

Customer care can also extend to asking them how they're doing in this challenging economy. Many of your best customers will be happy to complete a survey giving you information on how you can help them further.

Engaging New Subscribers - What messages and offers are most appropriate for new subscribers, who may not yet have made a purchase and who are still researching and considering your products and services? They're interested but not yet fully engaged.

Promotional discounts, customer case studies and testimonials as well as messages that serve to educate them on the benefits and advantages as well as the use of your products and services. Invitations to relevant events and links to your web site(s) are also good tactics for engaging this group.

Frequency can be as important as message content. Are you sending emails to your subscribers every day when they expected to hear from you once a month? Are you sending emails every quarter and your subscribers are forgetting that they opted-in to your list? If you aren't sending your messages at the right time schedule your subscribers will stop paying attention to you.

What is considered an appropriate level of frequency will depend to some extent on the level of engagement with a subscriber, but can also be judged by the customer's open, read, and click behavior. The seasonality or timeliness of your offer, and ultimately how well it meets the proven needs of the subscriber based on their online behavior and preferences, should also guide frequency.

If you note subscribers are choosing to read only every other message or have opened only two of your last 5 messages, you need to reassess frequency, provided it is timing not message relevancy that is the problem.

Listrak published a white paper entitled "Email Frequency: How Relevancy Tactics Changed the Rules" which discusses what you can do to determine your optimal frequency schedule.

Not following other email best practices can also result in losing customers. If your messages aren't branded properly, contain broken links, have weak subject lines, unappealing content, or ineffective offers buried below the fold, you aren't giving your subscribers a reason to read the emails.