Get a Life (cycle)
Friday, July 20, 2007 at 01:39PM | in Marketing How-To's | Email Article | Print Article | Share Article | Permalink Q: How often should I send email to my customers?
I get asked this question a lot. Before I get to the answer, I’d love to hear about other burning questions you’ve got on your mind. Feel free to respond to this post with questions about small business marketing.
A: “Mail once a month,” or some other arbitrary rule of thumb, can work — depending on your business. But it can backfire as well.
Here’s a true story. I was getting an email from a well-known lamp retailer just about every week. Not only did I opt out, it’s left a bad impression of the company. How often do I need to buy a lamp?
Let me introduce you to the concept of lifecycle communication — the idea is to make the timing of your email relevant to the recipient, and therefore more effective. Begin with a trigger event and follow through. For example, tie your mailing to a purchase cycle. If you’re selling ink cartridges, start with the date of the person’s last order, and time your email to when you anticipate they’ll run out of ink — say 6 weeks later (depending on the size of their last order perhaps). You’ll be top-of-mind just when they’re ready to place a new order.
There are all sorts of ways to apply this concept. You just need to really understand your customer. If you’re interested in learning more about that topic, let me know.
Reader Comments (2)
Very well said. Need I say more?
The focus of my business is to help primarily 2 types of people:
1-women who want to lose weight but have eating issues (e.g. eat when they are not hungry, use food to relieve stress, etc.) that get in their way.
2-people who are faced with serious illness (e.g. cancer, diabetes, etc.) who want ongoing support with diet and lifestyle change.
How can I best determine email newsletter frequency in this case?
Thanks!!
[Robbin's Reply:]
Hi Suzanne,
Thanks for your question. There probably isn't a simple answer to this one based on the information you provided. You're basically defining your target audiences, not specific trigger events. For example, in the first case, you couldn't time a communication to when "they eat when they're not hungry." However, if they were following a diet you had prescribed, you could time your newsletter to coincide with steps in the program, i.e., weeks 1, 2, 3 entail limiting consumption of junk food. Your communication could be timed to coincide with each week, and include tips such as a "bad food" list, what to look for on food labels, etc. So the idea is to map what your service to a trigger event, then time the communication to that and include appropriate content. Hope that helps.
--Robbin