Send the right amount of emails
Email has one of the lowest costs and highest ROIs. According to the DMA, for every dollar spent on email marketing in 2008, companies are expected to make $45.65 in sales. This makes it easy for companies to increase their frequency with little additional cost and, right now, many companies are moving from monthly to weekly or even daily messages. While more messages generally equal more conversions, this does not mean that you can simply jump in and start sending email messages to your subscribers every day. If you’re not careful, sending more messages can lead to more complaints, which will ruin your reputation and deliverability. In order to increase the frequency of your campaigns, you must ensure that each and every message you’re sending is relevant to your audience. Listrak has published a white paper entitled “Email Frequency: How Relevancy Tactics Changed the Rules,” that discusses how advanced features such as dynamic content and web analytics can help you capture and use customer data to ensure you are sending the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. It’s important to remember that subscribers consider spam to be any unwanted message, not just the unsolicited ones. It is also important to note the difference between unwanted and unexpected messages. In the past, it was necessary for marketers to set expectations on when subscribers would receive messages; however, it has been proven that relevant messages outperform scheduled emails. You can increase your frequency without asking for the approval of your subscribers as long as the information you are sending is interesting, helpful, and wanted.
Before you begin to send email messages more frequently you must be sure to have the right processes in place to handle the additional traffic. Your sales department and customer service center will receive more calls, your web site will have more traffic, and your marketing department will have more data to manage. Even messages that are highly targeted to specific users will increase the number of unsubscribes from your lists, and you must honor those immediately to prevent those subscribers from receiving additional messages from your company. Even though you have ten days to remove the subscribers from your list while remaining CAN-SPAM compliant, you’re putting your reputation and deliverability at risk if you continue to send messages to those subscribers. If you only plan to increase frequency during the holidays and will return to your regular schedule in January, you can build options into the unsubscribe landing page that allow subscribers to choose their own delivery schedule. First and foremost you need an easy-to-use unsubscribe feature that only requires the subscribers to enter their email address and click a single button to unsubscribe. However, you can also offer subscribers the ability to receive only one email per week or per month or emails that only pertain to certain topics. You could also offer subscribers the ability to suspend their accounts until after the holiday season. While this isn’t ideal for your holiday goals you’ll be able to begin sending messages to those subscribers after the holidays when sales and traffic slow down.
For more information on CAN-SPAM, read Listrak’s white paper “New CAN-SPAM Rules for 2008.”