I get one question and comment from clients and prospects fairly often. It goes something like this…
“I don’t want to annoy people so I don’t want to send emails more than one per month.”
Which leads to the following question…
“How often should I send emails to my list?”
I find that usually this stems from a belief that 1) email is annoying and 2) your prospects probably don’t want to hear from you or 3) you don’t think you have much to say.
And at the same time many will admit that yes, email done properly does work. And in fact kicks the stuffing out of other online methods for supporting your marketing goals.
Step 1: Have something to say.
It will hold true that if you don’t have something relevant to say your emails will fall on deaf ears and probably won’t work very well over all.
Try this.
Read your last newsletter. If it is chock full of stories about your last company BBQ and your mission statement most likely not much is happening with the reader. They really don’t care much about that stuff. To you it shows a personal side, to them, it’s boring!
If, however your newsletter has a lead story which outlines a case study about how one of your clients solved a pressing problem using your solution, then you might have their attention.
Do you see the difference between the two?
Step 2: Double or quadruple your current frequency!
Here’s two pieces of good advice in one directive. First, take the number of emails you currently send… and double it.
If you send once per month, now send twice. If you send twice, send four times.
When you do that, take a close look at your unsubscribe and spam complaint rate. Most Email Service Providers will provide this data in your email reports.
If your typical unsubscribe rate is .15% and you double your sending rate and the unsubscribe rate remains at .15% then your frequency is not an issue.
Since one of the main reasons for unsubscribes is ‘too frequent’ emails this metric will tell you it that’s true.
Most often your unsubscribe rate won’t change yet you’ll get twice the benefit of sending the email. More people will open, more people will click and more people will respond.
Second, if you send a single newsletter with LOTS of content break it into two or three smaller bite size pieces.
What happens with a long newsletter is people open their email, see your newsletter, notice that it’s long and say to themselves. “I do want to read this so I’ll just file it away for later” or worse yet, they create a special folder and a rule which automatically routes your newsletter to the folder to read later…
… and they never do!
If you give them three short bursts of information (relevant, like I mentioned earlier) they will take the time, right that moment, to deal with your email. They’ll read it, file it, delete it, click on it, but it will have a chance to do it’s marketing job right then and there instead of get filed for future reference.
So now the answer to “How often should I send an email to my list?” can now be answered.
Send it more often than you do now and…
… check your stats to understand your reader behavior.