the SWITCHBOARD

Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is not dead. Marketing experts agree, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your business. If you implement or are thinking of implementing an email marketing campaign into your strategy, you’ll find yourself asking “how often do I need to send emails?”, or “Is there such a thing as ‘too many emails?’” The answer to the latter is “Yes”. The answer to the former is: “It depends.” When it comes to email marketing, there is a “Goldilocks Rule”.

Under-emailing

If you’re utilizing email marketing but your data has nothing to show for it, you may be under-emailing your audience. Not every email will result in a sale. Some emails are just to remind your audience of your brand’s presence. If you are not emailing frequently enough, your audience will see you as irrelevant, leading them to unsubscribe. An uninterested audience leads to a decrease in sales. 

From a technical standpoint, infrequent emailing can affect your sender reputation. All emails have some sort of spam filter for their users. These spam filters tend to block emails from suspicious senders and infrequent emailing can sometimes mark an email sender as suspicious. 

Over-emailing 

If any of the above applies to you, it’s tempting to go in the opposite direction and significantly increase your emailing frequency. It’s important not to overcorrect, however, because over-emailing can also have negative impacts on your sales. If your science feels as though they are being bombarded by your emails, they will unsubscribe from your list. Not only does that mean you’ve lost a potential customer, but a high unsubscribe rate will negatively affect your reputation, causing your email to get caught in the spam filter that we mentioned above! 

Just Right

Think of your users like Goldilocks. Too many emails will turn them away. Too few emails will lose them. But if you get the email frequency just right, you have a life-long customer. But what is the perfect emailing frequency? The answer lies in your data. Emails with relevant information sent at the right time at the right frequency will have a high open rate. An “open rate” is pretty straightforward: it’s when someone clicks to open your email. But once your audience opens the email, are they actually reading it? That’s where the click-through-rate comes in. The CTR will show you if your email is effective by showing you what content in your emails received the most clicks. It’s easier to think about it like this: Open rate proves that you’re sending the right amount of emails. CTR proves that the emails you’re sending are relevant. A low open rate means you’re not sending enough or at the best time. A low CTR means your audience doesn’t care about the content of your email. 

So now that you’ve identified the symptoms over poor email marketing, it’s a simple fix, right? Unfortunately, no. Getting to the Goldilocks zone for email marketing requires some testing. The ideal email marketer should possess skills such as data analysis, copywriting, and graphic design, leveraging insights to tailor campaigns that resonate with their audience. By continuously refining your approach based on metrics and audience feedback, you can strike the right balance and maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

If you’re ready to implement email marketing for your business, Fusebox Marketing is here for your marketing needs.