Email Frequency: How Relevancy Tactics Changed the Rules
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
April 23, 2008
Marketers are used to planning ahead as most media buys must be scheduled months in advance to accommodate external press time and availability, along with the careful orchestration needed to balance the print, radio, TV, and online advertising with the updated corporate documentation, events, and most importantly, budget.
Email marketing provides a lot more flexibility as the delivery schedule isn’t dependent on outside factors. For example, if you have important company news you want to share with your customers, you can simply email them within minutes instead of waiting for a magazine or newspaper to print the press release in hopes your customers will read the article. However, just because email gives you instant access to your subscribers doesn’t mean you can email them impulsively or impetuously. Your emails must follow a plan that is as well thought-out and deliberate as all of your other marketing initiatives in order to remain effective.
The problem that most email marketers face is how to plan the schedule. Without the same restrictions set by external factors that guide other media, it is difficult to know how often and when to send email messages. Arbitrary guidelines, such as “never mail more than once in 72 hours” and “never send more than two emails per subscriber per month,” were put in place as general rules of thumb that helped prevent marketers from over-mailing to their lists. The guidelines always came with the caveat that marketers must gather the preferences of their subscribers and perform tests in order to figure out what frequency would work for them, but it still missed a vital piece of the frequency puzzle – relevancy. After all, it doesn’t matter how often you are sending messages if the content isn’t important to the recipients.
Listrak, a leading provider of email marketing solutions, has put together the following information detailing what you can do to determine your optimal frequency using relevancy tactics, such as metrics and analytics, as well as advanced features like dynamic profiling and dynamic content. Following these procedures will take the guess work out of your delivery schedule and will make it easier for you to plan future campaigns as you will know how often to send emails to your lists as well as the best time to send them. It will also increase the satisfaction and loyalty of your subscribers, which, in turn, will diminish the number of complaints against you so your reputation remains intact.
