How To Tell If You’re Driving Your Customers Crazy With Too Many Emails

How many more times can you send your customers an email before they deem your presence in their inbox unnecessary? This is a question we hear many times a day – how many emails are too many?

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to tell if you’re driving your customers crazy with too many emails.

One of the toughest questions any email marketer has to ask is, “How often should I send an email?” Many businesses want to know if there is an ideal frequency for sending emails.

The answer is “it depends.” It depends on the industry and the time of year. It depends on what you promised your subscribers.  Later in this article, though, we will discuss some “general” recommendations for email frequency.

It pays to remember that the subscription to your email list is always your customer’s choice. You hopefully told them how many times per month you’d email them and what to expect. Now, it’s your job to keep them on your list by providing relevant content at the right frequency.

Clues That You’re Sending Too Many

If you look at your email statistics over a period of time, you can glean some important information as to whether you’re driving your customers crazy. Here are some things to look for:

• An increase in the number of unsubscribes. This is the most direct proof that you are either sending too many, or your information is irrelevant.
• If you are sending more than one email per week, it pays to look at your open rate, click-thru rate and engagement levels.
• Outright customer complaints.
• An increase in spam reports. If you start to get too many of these, your email client service provider will drop your account in addition to the loss of your subscribers.
• A drop in open rates. This can result in a lack of trust on the part of the subscriber. Perhaps they don’t like your subject line, your content isn’t relevant or a combination of both.
• A drop in click-thru rates. Be careful with this one as not all emails revolve around clicks. You’ll want to pay special attention to emails that click-thru to landing pages.

It’s a Customer’s Choice

One survey shows us that frequency is one of the biggest reasons people unsubscribe from email lists. It validates the point that sending too many emails can drive customers away.

We intuitively know this, because in our own experiences, we’ve unsubscribed countless times after a barrage of emails. What we found most interesting in this survey was that nearly 50% of respondents said they would be willing to receive fewer emails if given that option when they went to unsubscribe.

So, it seems for consumers that there is a way to strike a happy medium.  Just be sure to offer some options on your unsubscribe page. You can offer content choices and frequency choices.

Monitor Your Relevancy

If you think you are driving your customers crazy with too many emails, we’ve got some suggestions for you when it comes to keeping your email customers happy.

When marketing through email, your primary consideration should be on what you are offering your customer. Remember, this is about them. They signed up for your list because they wanted something of value from you. Perhaps this was a promise of exclusive deals, product use tips or a weekly newsletter.

Getting the relevancy-factor correct should play a part when deciding what your frequency should be.

It’s worth noting that if you reduce frequency to keep your email subscribers, but you don’t provide relevant content, reducing your frequency won’t have any effect.

It’s important to monitor your relevancy. If you reduce frequency, but you don’t provide value, you haven’t accomplished much of anything. You haven’t increased click-throughs to landing pages or increased your conversion rate optimization.

The way to do this is with relevant, valuable, important email content.

A good tip: On your email subscribe page, tell your customers up front how many times a week they’ll get an email from you and what it will include.

Striking a Balance

Did you know that sending too few emails, called under-mailing, is as bad as over-mailing? If you’re sending one email one month, and none the next, only to send three on the third month, you aren’t sending a consistent message.

At the bare minimum, we recommend sending emails once a month. If your emails get to far apart, it’s easy for customers to forget you. Your goal is to stay top-of-mind while providing worthwhile content.

Another general recommendation is to send an email once a week. Do some testing to see what day and time work best for your emails. Then, stick to a schedule so your customers know to expect your email on Tuesdays at 1 pm, or whenever you decide what works best for your list.

For companies that send emails every day or several times per week, they usually notice that their stats drop dramatically. Why? Simply put, it’s hard to stay relevant and valuable that many times per week.

The Take-Away

Email marketing is continually ranked by marketers as the single-most-effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion and retention. In other words, email marketing is the digital workhorse.

The key is to keep your email list healthy, create an email marketing plan and monitor your statistics. You should continually be testing your emails to see when click-throughs and engagement drops off and when it increases.

Now that we’ve answered the question, “How to tell if you’re driving your customers crazy with too many emails,” we encourage you to create your email content strategy and start testing today.

Lastly, your customers are generally happy to receive your emails. They did sign up, after all. They become unhappy when you don’t provide what you promised. Tell them what they’ll get when they sign up and stick to it for the best long-term email results.

Have you tried email marketing? What worked for you? What didn’t? Did you have a problem with a large number of unsubscribes? If so, how did you remedy the situation? We’d love to hear about your email marketing.

If you’re ready to work with the leader in landing pages and conversion rate optimization, contact us today. We’ll provide you with our FREE site performance analysis so we can work on your landing page conversion rates.

Image: orphanjones via VisualHunt.com / CC BY