Too much? Too little?

Mark Brownlow (who I haven’t linked to nearly enough lately) has insightful commentary on the frequency question.
I really don’t think marketers should be afraid of sending email frequently. There are people who appreciate a lot of email. But I do think marketers should be careful when sending frequently. Good delivery is all about your audience and what you have to offer them.
As Mark says:

If every email you send me makes me $1000, you can send as many as you like. If they’re a waste of my time, then once a month is too many.

The companies with the best delivery bring the best value to their recipients. Sure, there’s the occasional issue where mail goes into bulk or is rejected. But when recipients don’t get the mail they want, the ISPs hear about it. And that costs the ISPs money, so they fix it.
Send mail your recipients want, truly want, and you’ll rarely have delivery problems.

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Standing in the stadium

If you distill marketing down to its very essence what you find is everyone battling for a targets attention. Everything marketers do is to get “mindshare” or, in normal people terms, attention. The goal is to get people to remember your product over all the other products out there.
Many email marketers seem to think that increasing the frequency of mail is the most successful way to get attention from their recipients. What would happen, then, if every email marketer started sending more email? Would this really get more attention from recipients?
I don’t think so.
Increasing mail frequency is like standing up to see better in a stadium. One person stands up (increases frequency) and that person sees better than they did before. But if everyone stands up (increases frequency), then everyone is back to where they were and everyone is back to not being able to see.

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Email frequency vs. Response

Mark Brownlow has a great post today detailing how response to a marketing campaign changes with the frequency of a campaign and the value of the campaign.

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The frequency conundrum

What is the perfect frequency to send mail? Is it daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, minutely (is that even a word?) or randomly? Any number of experts will give you a definitive answer to this question, but I don’t believe there is a single answer.
The frequency recipients will respond to depends on the type of mail, the recipient expectations, the sender and a host of other factors.
For one example look at the mail sent by social networks. Many people, myself included, will accept dozens of emails a day telling me someone wrote on my Facebook wall or retweeted something I said or wants to link to my network on LinkedIn. Another example is when I’m traveling or waiting to pick up someone who is, I am thrilled to receive multiple updates an hour from the airline.
This willingness to receive frequent commercial or bulk emails doesn’t necessarily translate to marketing emails. When Sur la Table started sending double digit amounts of email a week, I down-subscribed, and had they not let me pick an acceptable-to-me frequency I would have unsubscribed completely.
A lot of marketing experts insist that mailers don’t send frequently enough. That increasing frequency increases ROI. What a lot of people miss are all the caveats in the fine print. In their minds, increasing frequency goes hand in hand with increased segmentation, targeting and recipient specific emails.
The idea isn’t simply to mail the entire list more frequently but to mail those who are more open to increased frequency. This is an idea I wholeheartedly support.

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