“Am I mailing my opt-in list enough?”
The great unspoken truth of email marketing is that mailing more makes more money. But email marketers fail to fully exploit this fact because they are afraid of being seen as spammers – a misconception for which we have only ourselves to blame.
In the last twelve months I’ve had over a dozen clients and prospects tell me that they would like to send more email – but they can’t get the budget because their boss thinks consumers hate email and/or get too much email.
Yet every single piece of research confirms that email is the Number One way that consumers would prefer to be contacted by the companies they buy from. It’s unobtrusive, it puts the subscriber in control, and it’s easy to process. In addition, all the people on your list have specifically given you their permission to send them stuff, and they can switch off that supply any time they like at the touch of a button.
Why are we so obsessed with the idea that sending less email is good while sending more email is bad?
Email is RFI, not RFM
The reason is that email marketing continues to be dominated by a DM worldview, with a focus on RFM (reach – frequency - monetary value) and a resulting fixation on relevance, timing and ever tighter targeting. In other words, what we are trying to do is to get our subscribers to open, click and buy from a higher percentage of our emails – by sending fewer and fewer messages! But, can less ever really be more?
Surely not. The great unspoken truth of email marketing is that if you send more email by increasing your reach (growing your opt-in list) and/or increasing your frequency (mailing your list more often) you significantly increase the likelihood of making a sale.
So, given that we know that sending 2 emails will generate a greater return then sending one, why don’t we spend our time working out how to send more email? Answer: Because we’re terrified of being labelled spammers! This attitude of fear and self-loathing among email marketers is the single biggest obstacle facing our industry today. We are, quite simply, our own worst enemy.
Brand marketers use the broadcast RFI model (reach -frequency – impact) all the time, for the simple reason that it has been proven to work, time and again. (And so, of course, do spammers, which may be where some of the fear comes from.) But when was the last time you saw a case study or presentation that focused on the effectiveness of increasing reach or send frequency?In every other broadcast marketing medium, advertisers always try to push the boundaries of frequency to see how much messaging an audience will tolerate. Listen to a radio chart show with a dozen messages per hour from the same sponsor, and you’ll realise this frequency goes very high indeed. Yet no one accuses Microsoft of spamming the airwaves with Xbox ads. Can you imagine any other industry – TV, Radio, Press, Search, Banner or even Billboards – suggesting that the way to stand out from the competition is by doing less?
At Alchemy Worx we strongly believe that email is under-exploited by marketers because of a conditioned – but entirely misplaced – fear of over-mailing. Whilst we certainly agree that there is a maximum threshold for email communications, most people are far too fearful to get anywhere near it by testing higher frequencies.Instead, every best-practice document published preaches about the alleged Holy Trinity of segmentation/targeting, timeliness and relevance (or non-spammy behaviour). Email is the only channel where lower frequency is seen as good, and higher frequency is bad. The challenge is that it’s not consumers who have this view – it’s email marketers. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas!
Of course, timing, targeting and relevance are important and should be done whenever and wherever possible. But see them as the means by which we get our subscribers to tolerate a greater frequency of contact – NOT as a reason to send less and less email. More email works. Fact.
Last updated: Aug 05, 2016 admin
