1. How often should you send email marketing?
2. Becoming a trusted email sender.
3. Your company name is always on their radar
4. Creating spontaneous purchase opportunities
5. Regular sending to achieve better email marketing delivery
6. Reduce email marketing unsubscribes
How often should you send email marketing?
Ok, so probably the first question to address is, how often should you email your contacts? – we don’t want to do it too much, but equally we don’t want them to forget us.
There really is some variance here, depending on what you are selling. For example, if you are selling a fast turnover stock, that changes frequently then you may need to send more regularly than someone who’s products don’t change that much.
As a general rule of thumb though, twice a month is a good average across most industries, you should find that your recipients are quite happy to receive an email from you twice a month.
You should always be sending fresh content though, it’s never a great idea to just send the same mailer each time. You could perhaps consider sending one that focuses more on service and then perhaps one that focuses on an offer exclusively for your email subscribers.
Marketing Sherpa say…
"Content-focused emails now sell just as well as the product-focused ones"
Becoming a trusted email sender.
Email marketing is all about building trust and relationships with your recipients, people are more likely to buy from you if you are familiar to them and trust has been established.
M7 Marketing Development say:
"It’s kind of like asking someone to marry you on the first date. It may be better to ask for a second date instead"
When your emails become a regular fixture in your recipient’s inboxes, they will start to trust you through feeling familiar. This is even the case for customers that may have purchased from you for many years externally, they do still need to feel familiar with the content and presentation of your email marketing.
When we look at campaign stats for new clients, it can be clearly noted that stats get progressively better over time. With consistency and a sound strategy, email marketing can become the cornerstone of a businesses marketing strategy.
Email marketing really is about taking the time to build – campaigns always need supporting with regular sends.
Your company name is always on their radar
If your company name regularly pops in in their inboxes, this really increases the chances that when they next have a requirement for products or services that you offer, it’s you that they think of contacting first.
You may also catch them just at the right time, and securely an early sale. If your name is always front and centre it really increases the chances of getting that early sale.
Creating spontaneous purchase opportunities
The great think about email marketing, is that you can make the process of buying something very quick and easy – often only one or two mouse clicks away.
If you are emailing regularly, then this really increases the amount of spontaneous purchases. This works best when trust has already been built – if your recipient needs to research you online before buying, then often, the moment passes and the spontaneity fades.
If trust is there though, it’s the ideal circumstances for spontaneous purchases to occur. The likes of Amazon are masters at this, they’ll email you with products that you’ve recently browsed. Their purchase system is refined down to one click ordering.
Regular sending to achieve better email marketing delivery
When you send email marketing, the server that carries and delivers your email has a reputation score. This score either increases or decreases depending on positive or negative actions by it’s users.
This percentage score is then used by your recipient’s mail server to determine whether it’s placed in the box or spam.
One of the factors that create negative history is volume spikes, by this we mean no emails are sent for a while and then lots are sent. This creates volume spikes in the server’s history.
Inconsistent volumes are classed as a negative action and decreases the score – this then means that future sends stand a greater chance of being classified as spam by your recipient’s mailer server.
Reduce email marketing unsubscribes
Again, this leads on from familiarity – if your recipient’s are used to seeing your mailer, then the amount of unsubscribes dramatically reduces. It’s all about building trust through a consistent time based strategy.
If you only mail your customers a few times a year, then they aren’t used to seeing your mailer in their inbox, this often prompts viewers into unsubscribing in significant numbers.
This can even be the case with customers who have been dealing with your company directly for years.