Make More Money - Send More Emails: Is it Ever that Simple?

Anyone who has worked in Email Marketing has probably come across someone in their organisation - normally looking down from above, with 20+ years Direct Mail experience - who make statements like “send more”, “send to the whole list”, “Amazon send me three a day” or even worse “we’ve just found another million in an old system, add them now.” Is it really that simple? Is it a pure volume game? I’ve worked with email for over ten years and have encountered these challenges with many clients across a variety of industries and I can 100% tell you it is not that simple! But it is also not just about sending to your most engaged customers, as this too will limit the return you can achieve.

Another good question to ask yourself when considering this topic is how do you like to be communicated with? As an exercise to make the point, take a look at your inbox today and write down the first 20 marketing emails you receive, write down against each email how regularly you buy from these companies and then how frequently you would like to receive emails from them. I can guarantee that only a few of them will have daily against them (if any), a few will have every few days against them, a few more will have weekly and some will have monthly. We are not all Amazon, I can also suggest that their email marketers do not send every email expecting you to buy the product every time, they are there to keep you thinking one thing - Amazon - so we retain the brand to consider against other purchases. In reality they hold quite a unique position so should not be held as the go-to for a general strategy as many may think.

Behavioural segmentation is a tool we have in Email Marketing today which would have been a dream for those DM’ers of the 80s. We can tell a lot more than just what someone once bought, we know what they are engaging with and how often, and from this we can derive interest and provide relevance. Tools are also emerging now such as Tempo, RedEye’s predictive engagement tool which helps to set the frequency of email sends based on when someone is most likely to open their next email. Take a look at our case study with Hotel Chocolat where they implemented Tempo: Predictive Engagement and reduced their mailing volume by 40% while increasing revenue by 25%.

To conclude, good Email Marketing is about balance, we are all different, we all have different expectations and habits, which is why it is vital to use segmentation and frequency management to ensure we are as relevant and timely as possible with our communications to as many customers as possible!