According to some experts I must be a terribly inactive Internet Marketer.
Why?
Because I do not send out an email to my subscribers every single day.
There are as many theories on optimum email frequency as there are fleas on a dogs back.
From one extreme of an email or more every day to the other of every now and then and many variations in between.
Reasons for sending out daily emails are:
- People subscribe to your list expecting to receive regular emails asking them to buy your stuff.
- Not all your subscribers will read every email, so the higher the frequency, the greater the chance that more subscribers will read some emails.
- Daily emails keep your subscribers interest at a high level, they are more likely to open and read the next one.
- People become accustomed to frequent emails from you and look forward to them.
What are some reasons against sending out daily emails?
- Most subscribers already get too many emails, higher unsubscribe rates with higher frequency.
- Less chance of subscribers opening your emails.
- Difficulty of creating interesting, valuable content every day.
What then is the best email frequency?
There is no right answer, it depends on many things:
- What market niche are you in.
- What is the norm for that niche – should you follow the norm or do the opposite?
- Demographics of your subscribers, age, income, interests, free time.
- Type of products or services being sold.
- Complexity of market / niche /products – How much content can be created?
- Your own style and preferences.
I subscribe to some marketers that send out daily emails, some twice or more a week, a few weekly and some less frequently.
Here is an unscientific assessment of how I deal with the various frequencies.
Most of the weekly or less frequent emails I open and read on the day they arrive.
The 2 or 3 times a week emails I open and read if the subject line is immediately compelling or if the author is one who I regularly find worth reading. If those two criteria are not met, they get left for later and frequently deleted before getting read because they have moved too far down the list.
Daily emails get opened if the same criteria are met but generally only quickly scanned and often deleted before being read. Many emails do not get read at all.
Because I spend most of my working week in front of a computer, I try to stay away from it over the weekends. When I do check emails on a weekend, I am more likely to hit the delete button.
I “purge” my subscriptions every month or so, I unsubscribe from all the lists that have had more emails deleted than read in the previous month.
In the interests of effective time usage, I allow 15 minutes late morning and the same in the evening for emails, I scan my in-box and select the ones that seem to offer the most value based on my subject line / author criteria above. If I run out of time before clearing my in box, I delete without reading most of the unread emails.
If you are an Internet Marketer trying to sell me something, your best strategy is to email me no more than once a week, on a weekday, with interesting content, no hype or BS and I might even click on some of your links. As long as it’s interesting, I will read a long weekly email, but I rarely read a long email from someone who I heard from yesterday.
But remember that I am a cynical baby boomer, the email frequency that works for me might not work for others and vice-versa, that’s what split testing is for.
One of the weekly emails that I really enjoy, is one of my longest standing subscriptions, always survives the cut during my purges and I actually bought something through one of his links a couple of years ago is John Forde’s Copywriters Round Table. If you are interested in learning how to be a better writer of any sort and particularly for your business, then this one is essential reading. It’s not an affiliate link, I recommend it because it is good.
Wishing you success in all your endeavours.
Free images from FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I know my friends in e-mail marketing will hate to hear this, but the fact is I don’t read e-mail at all anymore. My inbox is so full of not exactly spam, but automated messages from blogs and websites and such that it became too difficult to even _try_ to find actual messages from friends, so I stopped trying. For those who still check their e-mails from time to time, I would definitely suggest sending messages less frequently and trying hard to make them high quality.
Thank you for your comment Alan. I am firmly in the less-is-more camp, when I look at comments from subscribers who unsubscribe from my blog broadcasts or newsletters, “too many emails” is the most common reason given.
It will be interesting to see whether the current love affair with social media will follow a similar pattern. I am seeing increasing numbers of articles and blog posts about social media burnout or fatigue and noticing more people claiming to be cancelling their Facebook accounts.
I definitely feel that “less is more”. I do like the blog summary emails because there are a few blogs (yours being one) that I like being “reminded” to go back and read articles and posts.
Many of my clients that are “new” to email marketing have a hard time viewing things from the “receiving” end and I know have this vision that their email arrives to the sender and that person is smiling…clicks on their links and buys their product/service/package instantly. They are also working off of “packaged” suggestions from popular coaching programs and don’t “make it their own” as well as do split testing as you suggest above.
Thanks for the article. Am sharing with my network and clients.
Thanks for your comment Irene, perhaps it should be a requirement that all new Internet Marketers subscribe to a minimum of 50 other marketers lists for 6 months before starting their own campaigns. That way we would all get fewer and shorter emails.
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