15 Aug How Often Should we Mail to Our List?
There are two different sides to this camp. One says publish occasionally. Don’t send too much mail to you list. The other says publish often, daily. Send lots of mail. And I guess there is a third base camp which says, “How about somewhere in the middle, once every week or so?”
My newsletter goes out every week. I don’t have too many unsubscribes from that, because I focus on content, not on advertising. But what about for those people who use their list primarily for marketing and sending offers?
How often should you publish to that list?
I don’t have a specific number for you. You need to test that for yourself, but I’m going to give you some interesting thoughts, worthwhile considering, and there are simply this. The less you e-mail the people on your list, the more likely they are to unsubscribe when something arrives. Simple reason why, they’ve forgotten who you are.
Hands up all those people who receive numerous e-mails each and every day. Every hand in the room goes up, doesn’t it? It’s a simple fact of life that we easily forget those things that are not that important to us. Now, for those of us who have an e-mail list and send e-mail, it’s incredibly important to us, but for our customers or our prospects, probably not so. I know it sounds like a backwards statement, but truly it’s not. You can send e-mails every day or three, and in doing so will probably receive less complaints than every week or two, if you’re sending to a marketing list.
It’s also worthwhile noting that the more freebies you send to your list, the more likely people are to unsubscribe. Why? Do you get spam? Most of us do. Aren’t spammers usually offering some beautiful thing that just seems to good to be true? Probably not a good idea to put yourself in the same category. Would you agree with me on that? Nothing wrong with asking people to spend some money. Those who do unsubscribe, well they weren’t going to become customers in the first place. A great way to increase your conversion ratio is to make paid offers to your list.
Another good idea, I heard this from E. Brian Rose, and he said that sometimes he makes honour offers, i.e., download this for free, but if you like it, click here to buy it. Interesting concept. I’m going to have to test that one, one day.
Of course, if they don’t like it, you might like to suggest they delete it from their hard drive. Hey, it’s not going to work for everybody, but it certainly will work for some. I have had people pay me for free products in the past.
Here’s a little sidebar. My mentor told me that for every free product you create, it must be so damn good that people think it should be a paid product. So let’s perhaps test that one the next time we’re putting our products together.
Let me finish off by saying this. E-mail marketing is an intensely private thing. And whilst it is different for every business and the number of times that we e-mail our list and the kind of communication we have with them should be based on what they want, not what I say, the general abiding principles remain the same. How often should we mail our list, probably more often than not.
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