One of the biggest topics marketers wrestle with is how many emails are too many. Successful email marketing is a balancing act. You must create interesting and useful content, and communicate with your audience often enough to generate engagement, but not too often. One of the most important things to determine in any email marketing plan is the frequency of email. The most successful email marketing campaigns find the perfect balance—contacting potential users often enough that your brand and message are familiar, but not so often that users tune out or are driven away.
Metrics are a useful guide to determine how many emails are too many. The following three metrics are vital in helping you determine just the right frequency for an email marketing initiative.
Opt-out rate – the “go-to” metric.
For most, the opt-out rate is the “go to” metric when determining whether or not email frequency is in line with user expectations. What’s interesting about the opt-out rate is that it varies wildly from one industry to another, but the absolute numbers remain very tiny. Constant Contact published statistics regarding opt-outs that show the rate varies from 0.11% for nonprofits to 0.33% for personal services.1
These numbers are still just a fraction of a percentage. For this reason, the opt-out rate is actually a very deceiving statistic and shouldn’t be the lead indicator in determining whether an effort can be deemed as a successful email marketing campaign. Additionally, the opt-out rate doesn’t take into account the number of users sending email directly to the trash or a spam folder. It is far more common for users to simply ignore a message versus actively opting out of future emails.
While you don’t want to completely ignore your opt-out rate, it is important to take those results and compare them with other statistics as well. A low opt-out rate could possibly mean nothing more than your subscribers find it’s more trouble to click unsubscribe than it is to just delete an email. Only by considering the opt-out rate along with the other stats can you get a complete picture of how an email marketing campaign is performing.
Open rates may be a better metric, but still misleading.
The open rate is a vitally important statistic. In an ideal world, this metric demonstrates how many users actually view the information inside, instead of just clicking delete. However, this is not a particularly accurate measurement. Many people open mails “unintentionally” and don’t actually interact with them.
One of the elements that can have the biggest impact on open rate is your subject line. Subject lines can lead a user to believe the message is legitimate and can have a direct impact on perceived value. And in general, perceived value is one of the drivers on whether an audience will want to continue to engage with emails.
This is also important when considering email frequency. Chances are your open rate will decrease as you send more frequent emails, unless users feel the emails are relevant and valuable.
Click-through rates may be the most telling metric.
The click-through rate could be the most important of the everyday email marketing metrics in guiding email frequency. Click-through rates are more accurate than tracking simple opens or opt-outs because your contact the user has to make an actual effort to interact with the email that was sent. It is a critical indicator and generally is tied directly to a successful email marketing campaign.
At the end of the day, aren’t we all most interested in generating engagement with users that can ultimately lead to conversion? Assuming that is the case, and your business isn’t an outlier with double-digit opt-out rates, click-through and engagement metrics are probably a more telling metric for guiding email frequency. These metrics tend to tie the closest to hard metrics, such as conversion, which are commonly considered the best indicators of whether an effort can be described as a successful email marketing campaign.
When click-through rates start to decrease, it may be a sign that users no longer value email content and something needs to change. In reality, it may not be that users are receiving too many emails from your company. However, it might mean that users perceive that they are receiving too many emails that lack value from your company. At a minimum, it is always a good idea to slow the number of emails until users are engaging at a higher rate.
Most businesses benefit from testing to help email marketing frequency. Running a few tests can help determine the best ways to boost your click-through rates and deliver a successful email marketing campaign. Testing can help determine what users value and what they don’t seem to find relevant. Even if the opt-out rate is higher than you’d like, as long as you’re getting those clicks and engagement is increasing, the results can be considered positive. After all, it’s impossible to please all of the users all of the time. The goal is to test the threshold of what users no longer perceive as valuable, and what is considered too many emails.
While these are three of the more well-known metrics that can help you determine whether you are sending emails too frequently, depending on your particular niche and your audience, there may be others that are important as well. Marketers need to continue to optimize their email marketing efforts if they are to achieve email marketing success. Do you believe your email marketing efforts are optimized to their potential? Sign up for J&C’s email marketing assessment and learn how to leverage personalization with practical applications to elevate your email marketing.
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Topics: Email Marketing
