When it comes to working out how frequently you should send out your email newsletters, you’re going to need to tread a fine, and carefully understood, line. You see, the perfect frequency of email newsletters is all about balance. It’s about reaching an optimum level whereby your readership is enthusiastic, your content is of the highest quality, and you aren’t relegated to the dreaded ‘spam’ or ‘unsubscribe button’.
You can start off by getting some ballpark ideas regarding frequency. Over the last few years, businesses are realising that bombarding their audience backfires. Therefore, many businesses (35%) email their audience just 2-3 times per month. However, either side of this frequency you also get 19% mailing just once per month, and a similar 21% mailing 4-5 times per month. Therefore, knowing where to put yourself can be tricky just looking at averages alone.
You Have to Get it Right
If you want to use email marketing to your advantage rather than disadvantage, then you absolutely have to get the frequency right. We can’t stress this enough. Frequency matters above all else.
Take a look at this data. A staggering 45.8% of your email subscribers will mark your email newsletters as spam if they feel they are being emailed too often.
Source: http://technologyadvice.co m/resources/email-marketing-study/
There are also the real life case studies that bring home the importance of frequency. Aviva, a well-known UK insurance company, increased their email newsletter from once per annum, to monthly, received 48% more insurance quote requests, 304% more unique clicks, and 45% more email revenue following the change.
However, there’s no set equation or rule that will let you know what your frequency should be. Whilst for some a daily newsletter is of paramount importance, for others this could spell disaster. It’s about investigating what is right for your business.
Knowing how to optimise the frequency of your newsletters is fundamental to business success and growth. Marketers rank email as the best marketing tool for return on investment and in fact, Facebook and Twitter together, only make up 0.2% of all emails, excluding spam sent each day. You cannot afford to get it wrong.
But how do you get it right? How do you find the email newsletter frequency sweet spot for your business?
Quality Content vs Frequency
Before even beginning to consider the optimum frequency of email newsletters you need to honestly appraise the amount of quality content you can generate. Whilst frequency is of paramount importance, if you cannot guarantee a base level of quality then the positive effect will quickly drop away. This means that even if you discover that your readership would tolerate an email daily, if you cannot guarantee the quality of the content then you must rethink the frequency.
By opting to use newsletter templates, you can boost your capacity for sending highly targeted high quality content email newsletters. Each and every newsletter should bring something of value to your reader, and pack a punch. By removing the hard-work of the templating, you may be able to increase your capacity.
Know Your Audience
Knowing the amount of high quality content you can produce then needs to be brought in to line with deep understanding of your readership base. Importantly, your audience is not a homogenous beast to be treated exactly the same way. Knowing the different characters and expectations of your audience is vital.
What will work for some, won’t work for others. This is where segmentation comes in handy. Segmentation means you don’t have to use a one-size-fits-all approach. If one group of customers respond best emailed weekly, and another fortnightly, with segmentation you can achieve this.
According to data from the DMA, 42% of businesses use over 6 different customer segments for their email marketing, with a total of 85% using multiple segments of different amounts.
However, understanding how to segment your email lists may require some detective work in itself.
You should therefore start off with a carefully thought-out testing process. You probably already have some intuitive idea about roughly the right number of email newsletters to send per month. Around this intuitive figure, pick three different frequency rates and test them with different subscribers. Remember to keep other variables (such as subject lines, and send time) the same. By using Kurios you can begin to analyse which frequency works best. You need to be taking a close look at both click-through rates, and opt-outs. This way you’ll start to be able to self-style the right email newsletter frequency for your business.
The Type of Email Newsletters You Send
Once you’ve got your frequency down pat, it’s time to start considering the types of email you send, and how these interplay with frequency. For example, transactional emails generate six times more revenue, and have eight times more opens and clicks, than other emails. Furthermore, given that 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns, your frequency should also be closely linked to defined user behaviour.
However, at the end of the day, frequency is still king. Get the frequency of your email newsletters right for your
