Email Marketing – Email Frequency
Just when you thought that you were ready to send your email into the world, there are a few more things we’ll need to cover in this lesson to make sure that you’re sending the right message at the right time to the right audience.
Creating an e-mail marketing document
We have looked at the content of the document in lesson 5 and the format the document in lesson 6. Now it’s time to turn our attention to the bigger picture.
Creating a series
A lot of care should be put into creating a series, even if you plan on sending out only occasional updates.
A series of email marketing messages should be intentional and well-defined; not haphazard.
As you decide on the content, you will have already started the consideration of how regular you want your marketing campaign to be. Obviously we’re not defining the occasional sales message here, but the more intentional and regular messages of newsletters and e-zines.
• Motley Fool, the investment advice organization, sends out newsletters fairly frequently… sometimes a few a day. If this is the route you want to take, be aware that it could take a lot of your time and effort which may potentially take away from other aspects of your business. However, you’ll be able to create shorter “bite sized” messages and you’ll always be at the top of your audience’s mind. Flylady.com is another organization that sends out several messages each day.
• Many email marketing campaigns send out messages once per week or once per month. Depending on your product and your audience, one might be more appropriate than another. If your audience is at the computer more often, they might want a single, shorter message each week. If they have less time but still crave helpful information, once a month might be more appropriate.
Would you ever do anything less frequently than once a month? That depends on who you are and what you do. Generally speaking, the larger the purchase you offer, the less frequently you have to send your message. For example, a car dealership should advertise more frequently than a realtor. An appliance dealer should advertise more frequently than a car dealership. A computer retailer should advertise more frequently than an appliance dealer. And so on.
Also, your message can determine what you send out. If you send out The Authoritative Buyer’s Guide to Stocks, you can probably get away with putting it out every quarter. More frequently would lower the worth of your message. Less frequently might make people forget who you are and confuse your occasional message with the spam in their inbox.
Ideally, you will probably want to create a mix of messages to send out. Here is an example for a car dealership:
• Weekly: highlight the 3 best deals on your lot plus money-saving car maintenance tips.
• Monthly: highlight the 3 most popular cars that month plus a coupon for an oil change and a free car detailing.
• Quarterly: Offer tips for traveling during that season along with a coupon for a seasonal check-up.
Here is an example from a financial company:
• Weekly: talk about some market movers and shakers and highlight one stock that seems to be doing well.
• Monthly: Highlight the top-moving stocks for that month.
• Quarterly: offer an authoritative buyer’s guide to stocks that could do well this quarter.
Here is an example from a company that provides online business consultation services:
• Weekly: highlight one customer with whom you’re doing business.
• Monthly: Analyze and industry that your clients use for vendors or customers.
• Quarterly: create a “state of the industry” document that talks about the industry in which your clients work.
As you can see, just from these examples, there are many exciting things you can do with your email marketing campaign and a campaign that mixes two or more frequencies can provide a variety of added-value services to clients.
Ultimately, you want to find content that they will find useful. That way, they’ll read the content and link its authoritative voice to you. And when they need the product or service that you offer, they will naturally turn to the authority on the matter… you. By providing a variety of messages at a variety of frequencies, you’ll be more likely able to stay at the top of their mind and enjoy “stickiness” which is a marketing term referring to how often someone views and returns to your message. Notice how the weekly, monthly, and quarterly messages in the above 3 examples are generally things that people might be interested in saving and going back to time and time again.
Creating coherence
You have decided on your frequency (and counted the cost, which you should have done in a previous lesson… just make sure the numbers are still the same if you’ve increased the frequency).
Now it’s time to assemble your message. In a previous lesson you started to put together a document that outlined the topics you wanted to cover in a year. If you want to publish weekly, make sure you have 52 ideas. If you want to publish monthly, make sure you have 12 ideas.
Some people feel that they should be fine starting with 30 or 35 ideas instead of 52, figuring that the other 17 to 22 ideas will come in time. Although you may want to do this, you are really taking a chance on it. The reason is that business often gets in the way of our best laid plans and before you know it, you’ve used up all of your planned ideas and now you’re faced with 4 or 5 months without any ideas to start you off. You will quickly fall behind. (We’re not trying to be negative here… just realistic from years of experience!)
Upon hearing our suggestion, some people may say that their industry is so news-sensitive that it doesn’t make sense to have the full list of ideas. This may be true, but Murphy’s Law suggests that those last 4 or 5 months will be “slow news months” and you’ll continue to struggle.
The best practice when developing a schedule is to come up with the full list of ideas. Then, if news does strike, you can always move one of the ideas to next year. However, if news doesn’t happen, you will have something to talk about.
In addition to creating a list, take note of the day it will fall on. Sometimes you may have to (or want to) adjust your message according to that day. If you are sending out messages on the 1st of every month, you can gear your message to New Years, and each new fiscal quarter. But don’t look JUST to the day… look around at days that are close by: In the US, Independence Day falls on July 4th and that may be on your audience’s mind during your July 1st newsletter… so mentioning it in your letter may make your newsletters seem timely. Also, be wary of who your audience is: if you are marketing to Canadians, for example, wishing them a happy Independence Day on July 4th isn’t appropriate. Instead, wish them happy Canada Day on July 1st.
Summary
In this lesson we talked about some of the frequency considerations you will need to think about when you’re developing your email marketing campaign. As well, you learned how you should build an entire year’s worth of campaign messages and appropriately organize them according to the seasons.
Watch for the next lesson…
You are Amazing!
-Dave
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