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Email Frequency: How Relevancy Tactics
Changed the Rules
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing . Listrak, LLC . April 23, 2008Email Frequency: How Relevancy Tactics Changed the Rules
arketers 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 bMalance 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.
The Information Age
Email newsletters were a thing of beauty, a work of art worthy of the Renaissance. They were entertaining and informative, and, like the Renaissance, they took a modern approach to classic ideas. Direct marketers were using technology to reach millions of subscribers instantly. And it worked as conversions and ROI reached record levels. Not only were monthly email newsletters used to keep the corporate brand in front of subscribers, they were also used to up-sell current customers, convert leads to sales, and inform everyone about all of the upcoming corporate events. When done well, the monthly email newsletter was nothing short of a masterpiece that inspired subscribers to take action. For most newsletters, that action was "click here for more information."
www.Listrak.com . 717-627-4528 . Fax: 717-627-6087Email Frequency: How Relevancy Tactics Changed the Rules
Although that approached worked for a while, we're no longer in the Renaissance. We're in the Information Age. People don't want to click here for more information, they just want the information. And they don't want to wait until next month to receive your newsletter and then waste time sifting through all of content that doesn't apply to them just to read the one thing that does. They want the information presented to them in a timely, efficient manner, and this has presented a lot of new opportunities for marketers to reach out to their subscribers more often in new, inventive ways.
Now more than ever, email marketers have the ability to send more messages to their subscriber base in order to enhance, and in a few cases replace, their corporate, one-size-fits-all email. However, for most companies corpo... [download for more]
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