Nobody wants to feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I suspect we’ve all experienced giving out an email address, then getting multiple emails a day and feeling totally bombarded.
On the other hand, sometimes we join a list and hear nothing for ages. What’s up with that?
As email marketers, we don’t want to abuse the permission privilege and start triggering unsubscribes and complaints. We don’t want to damage our reputations.
We do want to inform, educate, convince, market and sell. How do we find that goldilocks setting, where we’re not emailing too much, we’re not emailing too little, but we’re getting it just right?
That makes mailing cadence the topic of this episode of “Win the Inbox” where I, your host, Phil Hollows, CEO of email service provider feedblitz.com, answer one email marketing question in three minutes or less, to help you meet your personal and professional goals.
Often when I’m asked “am I mailing too much?” it’s from someone who wants to email more often, but is coming from a place of fear. They’re worried about upsetting existing list members and getting a bunch of unsubscribes.
The key to managing any email marketing campaign is to ensure that your emails are timely, actionable and relevant. If you hew to that mantra, increasing email frequency won’t cause the worst of the problems you’re afraid of.
Moreover, only existing subscribers will have this issue. New ones won’t – for them it’s just way it is. The concern ages out.
Whatever frequency you use, I always recommend making other options available. If you have a daily newsletter, offer a weekly alternative. That way you keep anyone who feels overwhelmed by a daily update as a subscriber – they just switch to the weekly list.
The trick is managing expectations. If you’re switching it up, combine an expectation reset with an off-ramp. For example: “This list will switch to a brief daily summary starting on the first; if you want to stay on the weekly schedule <click here>”).
How often should you be mailing?
I always advise mailing at least weekly. Mailing less often risks people forgetting that they signed up, or they lose interest. The list gets stale, and your unsubscribe rates skyrocket.
Once you have a cadence established, it’s important that you stick to it. Low subscriber churn derives from your being predictable and routine.
No matter what, a large and persistent change in unsubscribe rates is a sign that your cadence or content focus has drifted away from your goldilocks setting, and it’s time to fix it.
I have one exception to the predictability rule: Event-based email marketing. If you have a deadline, mail early and often about it. Maybe send exactly one email more than you’re entirely comfortable with. People are lazy, and if you let them procrastinate, they will. Don’t let them!
These are the goldilocks takeaways: Mail at least weekly. Be predictable, timely, actionable and relevant. Set expectations clearly, offer alternatives, and be diligent about deadlines.
Do these things, and you’ve got an email marketing program with a terrific foundation for success.
Please like, share and subscribe. There’s more at FeedBlitz.com/WinTheInbox, where you can also ask me a question you’d like addressed in a future episode. I’m Phil Hollows, and I’ll see you next time.
Whether it’s time of day, or day of the week, or day of the month, this question crops up time and again in forums, at conferences, and in our support queues.
I’m going to tell you the answer.
Hi, I’m your host, Phil Hollows, CEO of email service provider feedblitz.com. This is “Win the Inbox” where I answer one email marketing question in three minutes or less, to help you meet your personal and professional goals.
So in the intro I promised you the best time of day to mail your list. Before I give it to you though, I think it’s worth looking at why this question is asked.
If you think that by switching to Tuesdays at 2, or every third Thursday following the full moon, then your email marketing results will be transformed, I have news.
Changing the time of day, or day of the week, is unlikely to make a huge difference to your email marketing program’s success.
Maybe a percentage point here or there, which might be a very big deal for your business, to be fair. But. If you’re looking for a “Hail Mary” breakthrough moment, optimizing delivery time probably won’t give you it.
But, that said, a promise is a promise! So here’s the big reveal: The best time for you to send your emails is….
I don’t know.
WAIT. I don’t know, but there are people who do know exactly what it is.
I bet you want to know who they are, right?
Ready?
Your subscribers.
They will tell you. Not by answering a survey (although you could always try that as well), but by how their engagement changes when you alter delivery times.
They key to this is (a) testing, and (b) knowing what metric(s) you want to use to define success.
Start by building a mental model of your ideal recipient, and when the best time to reach them is in their daily and weekly routines. Then test based in that premise.
Mailing weekly? Split your list into days of the week, see which one does better over a long enough time frame. Don’t be afraid of weekends either, when there’s less competition in the inbox. Try it.
Got a daily newsletter? Try overnight, so the email is there when your audience wakes up. Or at lunchtime, when they’re on break. Bear in mind here that ¾ of the US population is in the eastern and central time zones.
If and when you get a result, get everyone onto that schedule and return to a predictable delivery cadence for the whole list.
One thing to be prepared for during this process is that there will be those who’ll dislike any change whatsoever. I once got a phone call late at night once from a subscriber who was furious that the email he used to get at 4:30 in the morning now arrived at six am instead, and what was I going to do about it?
I don’t know when the best time of day is for you to send your emails out.
I do know that your subscribers can tell you.
If you do optimize delivery times and get a result, share your results in the comments.
Please like, share and subscribe. There’s more at FeedBlitz.com/WinTheInbox, where you can also ask me a question you’d like addressed in a future episode. I’m Phil Hollows, and I’ll see you next time.
Email marketing sure sounds daunting. You know you should be doing it, but it can seem like a whole lot of extra work.
I get it. I was at a conference recently, and the “Getting Started with email marketing” session began with “lead magnets” and just got worse from there. Something so important, so effective, and so easy to start, was made to sound crazy complicated.
And that’s the topic of this episode of Win the Inbox – the quickest and easiest way to get started with email marketing without freaking yourself out.
Hi, I’m your host, Phil Hollows, CEO of email service provider feedblitz.com, and “Win the Inbox” is where I answer one email marketing question in three minutes or less, to help you meet your personal and professional goals.
So: what is email marketing?
You send an email to a list. That’s as basic as it gets.
You need people to join your list. For that, you need a subscription form, and you get that from your email service provider, or ESP. The company I started, FeedBlitz, is an ESP.
Then you send your email from the ESP.
All you need is a form and an ESP. That’s it.
Wait, wait, I hear you say, I need an ESP?
Yes, you need an ESP, because while sending a single personal email is easy, sending bulk email is surprisingly hard to do well. Three reasons:
1) Spam, blacklists and reputation
2) Subscriber management
3) Compliance and the law
Of course you’re not a spammer. If you’re just starting out your web site’s probably on a shared server, which is fine. But then you’re sharing an unmanaged email server, which is not fine for bulk email. In email marketing, you are the company you keep, and your web site neighbor may have just got you blacklisted; you don’t know what they’re up to after all. Plus: Many web hosts limit how much email you can send, because they don’t want to be blacklisted either.
An ESP’s job is to get your emails into the recipient’s inbox, so we manage our reputations obsessively to give you the best possible deliverability and avoid blacklists. With an ESP your web site neighbors can’t hurt you, and you can (largely) email as much as you like, whenever you like.
Then there’s subscriber management. Opt-ins, confirmations, unsubscribes, complaints, feedback loops, bounces, the list goes on. You want to do that? Of course not. But it’s part of what we ESPs do for a living, so you don’t have to.
Finally, compliance. There’s CAN-SPAM and CASL in the US and Canada; GDPR and CCPA in Europe and California. Email marketing opens you up to obligations that go well beyond changing your privacy policy. ESPs handle that for you, too.
So, again, here’s what you need to start email marketing quickly and easily:
1) An ESP
2) A subscription form from your ESP
3) That’s it.
More of your emails reach the inbox, and you outsource the hassle to the ESP.
Do it now. Don’t wait to be perfect. All you have to do is write your next newsletter. You can do that, right? Right.
If you liked this, please like, share and subscribe! There’s more at FeedBlitz.com/WinTheInbox, where you can also ask me a question you’d like addressed in a future episode.
