Email Right Touching - what is the right Email frequency?

I was prompted to address this due to discussion with E-consultancy blogger Graham Charlton who posed the question in the E-consultancy blog in his post "How often should you email your customers".

Managing email frequency is increasing as a challenge since more companies have realised the value of email marketing and are increasing their email frequency. But increasing email frequency will lead to reduced open and click rates and if you overdo it, unsubscribes and worse withdrawals of permission to market. This can lead to a poor image about the brand and fallling leads and sales.

Company Email lists are also growing which together has resulted in growth of email volume of 10% a year and the number of permission-based marketing emails received is increasing.

So what to do about it - these are my thoughts on steps you can take to manage email frequency as part of a touch strategy, based on numerous discussions with email marketers at training workshops.

Step 1. Measure your list activity levels.

The first step is to assess the impact of your email marketing frequency on the activity. If it is too high, subscribers will tune out.

The obvious thing to measure is aggregate open and click rates and most email broadcast systems are good at this.

But you need to go beyond this and use these measures that most systems can't measure readily, so you need to do some more analysis to identify:

• Average frequency of email received and plot profile by frequency for different list members - to see the proportion of the list who are receiving too many or two few emails - see chart.
• List activity - The % of your list that open, click and buy within a period, e.g. quarterly or annual.
• Recency of response - what is the average for the last open, click or purchase - a good  tip is to store recency in your email database as a field for analysis. Alternatively score list members by activity and store this in the database also.
• Break down list activity and recency measures by different type of list members - it may the frequency is working for some segments but not others.
• Break down list activity by time on list - commonsense suggests, that the longer they are on your list, the less responsive your emails will become.
  
  This article shows an example and a good way of assessing email list decay.
  

Step 2. Put in place a contact strategy

The contact strategy defines the minimum and maximum frequency of content and offers. For some examples - see E-permission marketing article, point 10 - Create an outbound contact strategy:

Step 3. Test Email frequency

You don't want to reduce email frequency for all list members since this will likely reduce overall sales, although in this case, this retailer found that reducing email frequency actually increased sales. 

Generally, you should aim to reduce frequency to those list members who have tuned-out of communications with a view to engaging them more through less frequent and so higher impact emails.

Here are some ideas that I have seen companies selectively test:
A. Reduce Email frequencies automatically for lower responding customers?
B. Increase Direct Mail for customers with a lower Email response
C. Give options to change content and frequency preferences through profile or survey (E-mail, DM)? Either rate this email, annual or when responsiveness drops.
D. Re-engagement campaigns through education on value?
E. Introduce a systematic programme for testing impact of frequency on response by offer

Similar ideas are available in this article reviewing options for Email marketing Frequency.