Email Marketing Frequency

1. EMAIL MARKETING FREQUENCY How often should you send marketing emails?

2. 01 02 INTRODUCTION CONCLUSION FROM SOME LARGE-SCALE STUDIES 03 04 FINDING YOUR FREQUENCY TIPS FOR WHATEVER FREQUENCY YOU CHOOSE

3. INTRODUCTION First, what do we mean by “frequency?” You may mix up the email frequency with email timing. Let’s differentiate: email timing demonstrates what time of the day or what day of the week you send emails; email frequency indicates how many times a day, a week, or a month you send emails. There is no universal truth when it comes to defining email frequency as low or high as this fully depends on the brand and its audience.

4. RISKS & OPPORTUNITIES OF OVERSENDING AND UNDERSENDING EMAILS High email campaign frequency Low email campaign frequency You may end up with users ignoring your messages or not having enough time to open and read all of them. It may become challenging to come up with fresh and relevant content if you need to create it every other day. Your company name may get forgotten by subscribers and your emails may start getting sent to spam. Your sales may decrease as a result of users not receiving enough offers or simply forgetting about them. Risks More emails equal more unique chances of users purchasing your products or at least interacting with your brand. You will be able to avoid email fatigue, low activity numbers, and low sales. Sending out fewer emails means you can invest more time, energy, and ideas into creating unique content and catchy design for each of them. Opportunities

5. What they studied: Read rates and click-thru rates based on different weekly email frequencies for fashion brands. Findings: The sweet spot is 6.21 emails-per-week–at least in fashion, other industries might vary. At that almost-daily rate of 6.21 emails-per-week, a sender has the best chance of everyone on their list reading at least one of their emails. Conclusion: If you send an email almost every day, your subscribers will be more likely to read at least one of them–and that should ultimately lead to an increase in clicks and traffic. The study didn’t provide any hard numbers on unsubscribe rates, but Zettasphere concluded, “Increasing frequency doesn’t increase the unsubscribe rate, but it will increase the number of unsubscribers per month… [but] it’s unusual for the value in lost subscribers to be greater than the gain in additional revenue.” What they studied : Open rates, click-thru rates, and sales based on different monthly email frequencies. Their study focused on newer retailers with email lists of 5,000 subscribers or fewer. Findings : Open rates and click rates go down with the more emails you send in a month. But… customers continue clicking through and placing orders when companies sent up to 19 emails a month. Conclusion:Especially for smaller eCommerce shops, sending at least two or three emails a week is going to help drive sales without irritating your customers. WHAT STUDIES SHOW What they studied : Complaints and read rates based on different weekly email frequencies. Findings :The number of complaints is pretty low until you’ve sent five messages in a week–but at that point, complaints skyrocket. Read rates also drop noticeably after five messages per week. Conclusion : Return Path concluded their data shows subscribers are cool with “up to about five emails per week… beyond that, the ensuing complaints increase dramatically, and read rates drop significantly.”

6. 4 things to consider when Finding your frequency 1. How often will you have something worthwhile to email to your subscribers? 2.  What do you sell and how big is your company? You want every single one of your emails to provide value to your subscribers (it’s one of the main reasons to keep an email marketing calendar). Whether that’s value in the form of a discount or sale, value in the form of a product announcement, or value in the form of interesting content, it’s important there’s some obvious value. When you demonstrate clear value and each email has a reason to exist, it should do wonders toward keeping your list happy, engaged, subscribed, and buying. Subscribers, without even realizing it, have varying built-in expectations for email frequency based on a company’s size and industry. Flash sales sites and sites offering big discounts, massive retailers and sites with large catalog and personality-driven brands send emails almost on a daily basis. Smaller eCommerce shops with fewer products and fewer subscribers, premium and luxury brands and B2B companies usually send a few emails per week or month.

7. One way to make sure your customers are comfortable with your send frequency is to tell them what to expect up front. If you say you’ll email daily, they know to expect that when they sign up. And if you say you’ll only email occasionally, they’d be turned off if you send every day. 4. WHAT EXPECTATIONS DID YOU SET? 4 things to consider when finding your frequency 3. WHAT IS YOUR COMPETITION DOING? If you haven’t subscribed to your competitors’ email lists, you should. Watch how often they send emails to better understand what the customers in your industry are looking for. And beyond just frequency considerations, it’s worth subscribing because it’s very valuable to see what your competitors are doing right and wrong with their email marketing–so you can avoid their mistakes and outdo on their successes.

8. Tips for whatever frequency you choose Use different frequencies for different segments After you ramp up your sends, carefully monitor your results Offer an “opt-down” option for fewer emails Segmented emails have been proven to lead to increased open and conversion rates, and lower unsubscribe and complaint rates. But beyond segmenting by the classic criteria like age, location, or gender, it’s also worth considering doing some frequency-based segmentation on customer behavior. Send more emails to people who’ve shown they’re more likely to click through and buy. Those people have given you irrefutable evidence that they’re interested in and engaged with your brand–so the odds are they’ll be more amenable to frequent emails. One more advanced tip around frequency segmenting: Consider a “double open” strategy. That’s where you take the segment of your list that didn’t open an email and send it back to them a few days later with a different subject line. The scientific way to find your ideal email frequency is to slowly ramp up your number of sends, monitor the results, and pull back before the unsubscribes and complaints escalate too much. So when you increase your sends, keep a close eye on your open rate, click-through rate, sales, and unsubscribe rate. Ideally, you’re looking to stay in the zone where you’re sending enough emails to maximize your sales without hitting the tipping point where your sales numbers start going down because you’ve driven away too many subscribers. When you present an “opt-down” option, you can potentially save subscribers who would otherwise unsubscribe; it’s not that they don’t want to hear from you, they just want to hear from you less. In fact, more than 40 percent of people who want to unsubscribe say they would rethink it for an “opt-down” option. One of the easiest “opt-down” systems is to give two options: Continue getting all emails, or just get one round-up digest every week. Just that one extra option to reduce frequency could save you lots of subscribers and customers you’d otherwise lose.

9. CONCLUSION When it comes to email, the best strategy is always to listen to the needs of your audience and do your best to meet their expectations.

10. THANKS! Does anyone have any questions? hello@smbelal.com smbelal.com /xhubho Please keep this slide for attribution.