Re-Energize Your List: Frequency
In the last blog, we looked at how you can try to re-engage subscribers who are not opening your emails. But what about subscribers whose responses are diminishing, but whom you haven’t ‘lost’ yet?
Adjust Your Frequency
What is the point where the return on your emails (and the value of your emails) diminishes because you have fatigued your customers by sending email too frequently? For the most part you’ll have to determine this on your own: there is no one answer to how many emails are too many vs. how many are effective. But here are a few places you can begin:
- Since frequency is in the eye of the beholder, one strategy for dealing with this issue is to let your customers decide how frequently they receive email from you. Let them sign up for weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly emails. You can segment them into groups or categories based on this preference. You can either create separate publications for each of these preferences (for example, combining two weeks’ worth of weekly emails for your bi-weekly subscribers or a months’ worth of emails into one email for your monthly subscribers) or you can just send your regular weekly email that falls on the week your monthly subscribers get their once-a-month email (and the weeks when your bi-weekly subscribers get their bi-weekly emails). It’s much easier to manage sending at different frequencies than it seems.
- If you think you might be over-sending to your customers, then try sending less often. Before you commit to a new schedule, test the diminished frequency on a portion of your list. Segment a sizeable portion of your list and for the next month or so, send to them less frequently than you normally do. Whatever period of time you decide to use as the test period, make sure that by the end of the test period, you’ve sent a few emails so you can better measure the effect reduced frequency has on open rates. You could find out that you can send less often but have the same number of emails opened as when you send more often—because you gain back some customers that had stopped opening email they perceived as coming too often.
- Are you risking fatiguing your customers who receive more than one of your email publications? If you mail to several lists, check to see how many subscribers are on both lists. Consider the effect the frequency of your mailings has on the single subscriber who receives all (or many) of your different email publications. If there is a lot of list overlap, or duplicate subscribers, you might need to reconsider the frequency with which you send your emails to these subscribers. If you can’t adjust your frequency, then consider alternating the emails the duplicate subscribers receive so that they don’t get overloaded.
Communicate with your customers and solicit their feedback as to the frequency with which they prefer to receive your emails. Test different sending frequencies. And above all, when you make adjustments, pay attention to your open rates—especially the open rates among customers that are not freshly added—so you can measure the effect of your efforts at re-vitalizing your list.