Okay, so how often should you send out marketing emails to your list? After all, email marketing is easy to do and very cost-effective.
There's a whole load of factors that go into this and I'm going to share with you some stuff that I've done.
TRANSCRIPT
Now there are three key factors with this:
- your business type is (e-commerce, services, retail etc)
- who your customers or potential customers are
- whether you're B2B or B2C (business to business or business to consumer)
Now, first things first, let's tackle marketing emails for business to consumer.
One of the things that you need to take into account is how frequently you think it's worthwhile touching base with your database.
A wise move is to use your social media and all of your online activity to get people to your website and get them onto your email list.
Largely because social media is not your platform. You have no control and you have no way of properly managing that relationship.
However, if they're on your email list, the only way that they are going to be able to stop you from contacting them is if they unsubscribe.
Marketing emails, the key ingredient:
If you make your emails engaging and interesting, you will keep people on your list for a long time.
You need to make sure your emails are keeping people interested.
If you're sending out sales emails, you need to make sure that you're selling things that are actually relevant to your target customers.
But the key thing is to try and be engaging, as you would across all of your online channels.
But what's great about email is that the return on investment can be huge because it's dirt cheap to do. You can reach a lot of people very quickly, and response rates might be low, but oftentimes, considering what it costs you, the return on investment can be high versus what they spend.
Typically, if you're selling B to C business to consumer, you can get away with emailing people a couple of times a week.
Some companies here in New Zealand send me something nearly every day, which to me is a bit much and I delete nearly all of them. Ultimately my spam software will pick it up as spam.
With business to consumer (B2C), as long as it's engaging, you can get away with more frequently
I used to belong to an online guitar school as well, and they were sending me stuff out every day, sometimes twice every day. And to me, that is a bit too much so I unsubscribed.
Not only that, if you're self employed or running a tiny business, you might not have the time to come up with something to send every single day.
So it all again comes back to your business. Do you have the capacity to send out an email every day or twice a week? And if you don't, then obviously you need to think about this.
I would say if you're sending something out once a week, as I do to my entire list customers and non customers, then I think that's all right.
Selling business to business.
I'd like to start with a short story about a friend of mine who is a tax consultant in the UK.
She was sending something out every month, and I tried encouraging her for a long time to send something out more frequently.
She didn't want to bombard her customers.
But here's the thing: if you're not in your customer space on a frequent basis, I promise you, they'll have forgotten about you. Unless your business is incredibly memorable (not a common thing).
So I told her to just send something out every three weeks or every two weeks rather than every month.
Well, she tried it and Funnily enough. The inquiry she got from her emails went up. Who'd have thought?
So don't worry about bombarding your customers. If you're bombarding them, they'll probably let you know. But like I said, don't stuff their inbox with things which are irrelevant.
Now, this friend is very good at what she does. She's published books on what she does and is considered a thought leader in her market. And she thought that she'd be bombarding her customers with once every two or three weeks.
As it happened the unsubscribe rate was tiny and it turns out that her audience was interested in what she had to say.
But again, she still had to go through the exercise of making it engaging and interesting, even on a sexy (not) subject like Tax.
So again and I can't emphasise this enough.:
Be engaging and informative, no matter how often you send out marketing emails
Now, a good indicator of the quality of what you're doing is the unsubscribe rate.
If you're getting a really high unsubscribe rate, you need to have a take a look at several things.
First of all, the frequency.
If you are bombarding people, if you are pestering people, they will just unsubscribe because it just becomes too much. They'll just delete your emails and eventually get to the point where they think that there's no point in being on the list, they're not reading it and will unsubscribe.
So have a look at your unsubscribe rates. That could be an indicator that your emails are too frequent, it's not engaging enough, or that you're not reaching the right people with the right message. But unsubscribe high rates are often an indicator that something isn't quite right.
Remember, email marketing is dirt cheap. I use the software called ActiveCampaign, which I absolutely love. Mailchimp is very popular. Some people use systems like Constant Contact and AWeber. And many CRM systems (like Zoho and Hubspot) have email marketing modules too.
They're all really good. . Good reports, moderately easy to use, some more than others. But because they are so inexpensive, there really is no cost prohibition from doing this. In fact, some of them will even give you free service if you got a tiny database. So there really is no excuse.
But the key thing is, how often can you send something out? I would say once every week is great, once every three weeks maximum.
It's your job to stay in people's minds, it's not their job to remember who you are.
Whatever you do, make up the decision for you. I send stuff out weekly. It's always designed to help my audience, no matter whether they're customers already or their potential customers.
There's always stuff in there that's designed to help people build their business and do stuff more effectively in their businesses. It's free information so they can stay keep up with their work.
Your approach could be different. If you do ecommerce, you could be making offers. You could be letting people know about new products and services, et cetera. It's entirely up to you
There really are no excuses for not sending out marketing emails. Return on investment is typically high, and it is one of the lowest cost, most impactful marketing channels out there.
Want more on email marketing? Check out:
Email newsletters are a waste of space – here’s how to do it better (article and video)