Determining how many e-mails to send
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Written by admin on September 29, 2008 – 11:35 pm
Determining the proper number of e-mails to send is a fine balance: Send too many e-mail messages, and you overwhelm your audience with too many e-mails. Conversely, send too few, and you can overwhelm your audience with too much content in each one. The total number of e-mail messages that you send should match your consumer’s need for your information and not your need to send the information.
For example, a realtor might want to send dozens of e-mails over a period of weeks to people actively shopping for a home while sending only one e-mail per month to people who rent an apartment, with no immediate intentions of purchasing a home. Estimating the total number of messages your audience expects usually depends on two factors:
- The number of times your audience engages in a buying cycle If your prospects or customers purchase your products or services once per week, sending 52 e-mails per year is probably a good place to start with your frequency. If your prospects or customers take months or even years to make purchase decisions, you can base the number of e-mails you send on the number of times that they are likely to talk about their purchases with their peers. For example, if you sell once-in-a-lifetime vacations, you might create an affinity club for past vacationers and keep your customers talking about their experience by sending invitations to members-only social reunions four times per year.
- The amount of information your audience needs to make a purchase decision
Some purchase decisions are easy for consumers to make, but others require much more consideration. If your audience requires a lot of information to justify a decision, the number of e-mails that you send should increase so you don’t overwhelm your audience with too much content in a few e-mails. Instead, send several e-mails with a bit of content in each one.
Estimating how many e-mails you need to effectively deliver all of your information might be as simple as dividing your information into equal parts or as complex as delivering successively greater amounts of content as your audience becomes more engaged.
For example, Mailing List Direct specializes in providing residential mailing list that enable businesses to reach their target markets, grow their sales, and increase their profits.
Although paying attention to the needs of your audience is always the best policy, sometimes your e-mail content dictates the appropriate number of messages to send. For example, the total number of e-mails you send might depend on:
- The amount of change in your content: If your e-mails always have the same basic message, you don’t need to send as many as if your content were always fresh and new.
- The theme of your content: If your e-mail includes frequency in the theme, you can match the number of e-mails you send to that theme. For example, if your subscribers sign up for a daily motivational quote, you need to send 365 e-mails for the year, but delivering an annual report requires only 1 e-mail per year.
