How often should I be sending my e-shots?

Providing you have followed the rules of permission marketing, your customers have asked to hear from you and if your newsletters have been written properly they will be of some interest to the reader. But how often do you send them out? Every day? Every week? Every month?

It could be likened to speaking to a friend, if they have something interesting to say you don’t mind when they contact you but if they ring you every day and tell you something relatively boring then you begin to dread their phone call and if possible you attempt to ‘unsubscribe’ from the friendship…
If you are a business, individuals find it much easier to unsubscribe to your e-shots than they do to cut off from a friend so unfortunately the odds are against you!

It would be simple to recommend that businesses sent their mail shots out every month as that would ensure customers wouldn’t forget about you and hopefully there would be enough interesting information to be included in the e-shot itself. However if your business is fast paced, evolving on a regular basis and in touch with consumers regularly why not give them more regular updates? It could be that once a week or once a fortnight would be a better option for your business as if you left it a whole month you could have missed many opportunities to alert customers to good offers and new information.

So as usual, it depends!

When you send out e-shots depends completely on the individual business but by following these basis rules it will ensure your database doesn’t dwindle:

1. Ask your customers how often they would like an e-shot.
2. Measure click through rates and see if e-shots are a valuable communication tool for your business, if not there may be better ways to utilise your marketing budget.
3. Keep a similar format – that way recipients know what to expect and can easily navigate the email.
4. Make sure your offer different formats as some formats aren’t compatible with certain types of browsers – nothing worse than spending time and money when a customer can’t even open it…
5. Don’t be afraid to try something different!

Article Written by Carli Smith


Visit Inferno Designs for more on Email Marketing and Online Business Marketing