Still working on the Gmail document. I got a little stuck today writing it, and have put it aside to try and work through the stuck place.
There was a very long discussion on Only Influencers today about frequency and un-engaged recipients. Lots of interesting opinions and a lot of people strongly welded to their points of view. One of the best comments came from John Caldwell, though.
Pummeling people with irrelevant content isn’t any different that pummeling them with relevant content. Once you’re at pummeling content has nothing to do with it. They weren’t responding to your content before; what makes you think that it was just because they weren’t getting enough of it.
What are your thoughts on volume? Does increasing volume improve responsiveness?
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It might, *if* I was interested in the subject and *if* the emails had been coming only once every few months or less. But the number of cases where “more is better” with bulk email are out in the noise. Generally, if I’m ignoring a stream of email, the first thing to check is whether I might be getting so much of it that I just don’t have time for it. That doesn’t apply just to the miniscule amounts of advertising bulk email that I ask for, but for interactive mailing lists and forums as well.
“Does increasing volume improve responsiveness?”
Absolutely. As an end-user and a postmaster representing many end-users, I can confirm that pummeling immediately increases the volume of clicks on the unsubscribe link!
Pummeling does not work… consistent CTA within diverse content does. Over the last four years this has been a major project for me with the NZRB ( http://www.tab.co.nz ) changing the content volume, frequency and method of deploying diverse content with a preference centre has moved the open and participation rate up from 10%/15% to 45%/25%. Whilst these figures do not offer the inherent ROI we search for, it has reduced cost and subscriber churn.
Pummeling is still an issue for us as the GM searches for revenue based on the theory that more messages equals more opportunities. One key learning is to make sure the ‘Decision maker’ gets all the messages and provides feedback on reader fatigue and to provide weekly educational whitepapers on how our customer’s react.
I have a sub-folder called “lists” for list traffic in general. When list email arrives in my inbox, I glance at the subject line to see if I want to read it, then I manually drop it in the lists folder. If a list persistently/frequently sends me zero-content mail, it gets added to the filter that automatically drops it into the lists folder. I check the lists folder maybe once a month. Once a list is in the filter, it’s there forever. I can live with lists that send me zero-content ‘update’ emails every few months. Once a month will likely put you in my filter; any more often than that, & I’ll unsubscribe if you make it easy, or report you as a spammer if you don’t.