Finding the right balance is always important if you want your online presence to grow. And when it comes to best practices for email marketing frequency, it becomes all the more important. You need to find the niche between sending hundreds of emails to your recipients leading them to simply opt-out of your broadcaster’s list and being extremely irregular with your mails. There is always a balance, the right number- something that you need to find. Only then will you be able to keep your clientele whilst maintaining a proper distance with them. If you don’t want the lead generation work to go to waste, there are some best practices that will help with your email marketing frequency, and subsequently, the best practices for email frequency.
Email Marketing Frequency Best Practices- Five Steps
Email Marketing Frequency Best Practices – Establish Your Hypotheses
For this to work, you need to jog your memory back to those science classes you had back in school- for you would need to envision what it is specifically you want from these tests. To determine success, you first need to know what results you want. Let’s get you an example-
Imagine that you believe improving your email marketing frequency from once a week to four times a week would improve the click-through rate of your website by 40%, or maybe you will see an increase in ‘wheat bread’ leads that would soon be at a prospecting stage due to your 15% nurture. On the other hand, you might also believe that people are opting out of your email marketing very fast, and if you can reduce the number of emails you send, you will be able to stop the flow of people unsubscribing. It is your business- you determine all the hypotheses you want to test out. Just remember that you need to fix a hypothesis and stick to it. Otherwise, the test may not work.
Step 2 – Choose a List Segment
Instead of taking your entire mail list under a test, choose a segment that you want to test. It would make the test much easier to conduct while bringing forth conclusive results. But remember that the segment should have enough data while being diverse enough. Also, the segment you choose should match up with the hypothesis you have in mind. Imagine you are testing for an increased offer click-through rate that is targeted towards your subscribers. Here choosing the segment of the customer list isn’t going to cut it- you need to choose from your blog subscriber. Here, you should choose one that not only has a sample size which is enough to test your hypothesis and provide conclusive results, but also receives emails from you.
Email Marketing Frequency Best Practices – Establish Baseline Metrics
After you have already determined what your sample size would be, and what results are to be conducted on them, you can start mapping up your performance metric for the sample size. This is one of the most crucial steps when it comes to charting email marketing frequency, as it is important to compare your results with something. You also have to note down certain metrics of email marketing like deliverability rate, open rate, unsubscribe rate, etc. Also, there is no reason why you should constrain yourself to traditional metrics of email marketing. You can explore the metrics of website performance too. As an example, let’s just say that you are quite interested in finding out the click-through rate of a particular offer. This means that you might also be interested in checking out how many subscribers not only clicked on the link but filled out the form too.
Step 4 – Create and Schedule Your Test Emails
For the fourth step, create a sample test email that you would send to all the recipients in your mail list. The email should be created along the lines of email marketing frequency best practices, and should not be something new. The time for innovation will come, but right now you must walk on a normalized territory to get conclusive results. If you change your content, your results may get skewed, and we don’t think you want that. Keep your changes for later. After the mails have been created, schedule a proper date and time for when you want to send them out. Remember, if your test takes more than a week select the same day and time so as to not change the data or the variables. There will be a test where you might need to change the days, but this is not that test.
Email Marketing Frequency Best Practices – Measure and Analyze Results
After the mails have been sent, you need to start checking up the results with your base results and your hypothesis that you have pre-recorded. Also, be sure to check up on your email marketing frequency to note any anomalies that might come up during testing- for variables may change at any point and you should be on guard to notice changes.
Now, note your data. What do the results show? Is it positive? Should you send more emails every week to ensure that you receive positive gains without sacrificing either your clientele or the quality of your emails? Or should you reduce the number of emails you send to ensure people don’t opt-out of your mailing list? Whatever be the results, the email marketing frequency test will surely help you determine and decide the next series of tests where you would be able to test template design, frequency, message copy, subject line, and others.
Email marketing frequency best practices can make or break your website, and if you don’t have a solid testing system before you, you would always be in the dark regarding them. You need to ensure that the best practices for email marketing are conducted without bias or corruption, and they match up exactly as your hypothesis dictates.
