Quote of the day

Still working on the Gmail document. I got a little stuck today writing it, and have put it aside to try and work through the stuck place.
There was a very long discussion on Only Influencers today about frequency and un-engaged recipients. Lots of interesting opinions and a lot of people strongly welded to their points of view. One of the best comments came from John Caldwell, though.

Pummeling people with irrelevant content isn’t any different that pummeling them with relevant content.  Once you’re at pummeling content has nothing to do with it.  They weren’t responding to your content before; what makes you think that it was just because they weren’t getting enough of it.

What are your thoughts on volume? Does increasing volume improve responsiveness?

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Preferences pages

As often as I talk about how badly companies send mail, I think it’s always a good idea to highlight when I find companies doing good things.
Today’s example of a company making me happy is Sur la Table. I’ve been on their mailing list for quite a while and do enjoy the offers and information they send. With the advent of the holiday cooking season, though, they’ve massively increased their volume. 21 emails in September, 25 emails in October and 37 emails in the month of November.

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Food for thought

Companies that can’t be bothered to implement good subscription practices will rarely be bothered to send relevant or engaging email.
True or False?

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The frequency conundrum

What is the perfect frequency to send mail? Is it daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, minutely (is that even a word?) or randomly? Any number of experts will give you a definitive answer to this question, but I don’t believe there is a single answer.
The frequency recipients will respond to depends on the type of mail, the recipient expectations, the sender and a host of other factors.
For one example look at the mail sent by social networks. Many people, myself included, will accept dozens of emails a day telling me someone wrote on my Facebook wall or retweeted something I said or wants to link to my network on LinkedIn. Another example is when I’m traveling or waiting to pick up someone who is, I am thrilled to receive multiple updates an hour from the airline.
This willingness to receive frequent commercial or bulk emails doesn’t necessarily translate to marketing emails. When Sur la Table started sending double digit amounts of email a week, I down-subscribed, and had they not let me pick an acceptable-to-me frequency I would have unsubscribed completely.
A lot of marketing experts insist that mailers don’t send frequently enough. That increasing frequency increases ROI. What a lot of people miss are all the caveats in the fine print. In their minds, increasing frequency goes hand in hand with increased segmentation, targeting and recipient specific emails.
The idea isn’t simply to mail the entire list more frequently but to mail those who are more open to increased frequency. This is an idea I wholeheartedly support.

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