The CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t specify what types of e-mail content to send to your e-mail list subscribers. The best practice is to send e-mail content that matches your audience’s expectations or interests. Here are some tips for setting expectations for your potential e-mail list subscribers and for sending e-mail content that matches their expectations as well as their interests:
- Include a description of your e-mail content and your typical frequency in your sign-up process. For example, if you send a monthly e-mail newsletter along with periodic promotions to your e-mail list, your e-mail list sign-up form might include a sentence that reads Signing up allows you to receive our monthly e-mail newsletter as well as periodic special offers related to our newest products.
- Send only the content that your e-mail list subscribers expect you to send. For example, if potential e-mail list subscribers share their e-mail address in order to receive a quote for your services, don’t send themoffers unless they gave you permission as part of requesting a quote.
- Allow your e-mail list subscribers to choose their own interests. If you send several distinct types of e-mail content such as coupons and event invitations give your e-mail list subscribers a list of categories to choose from when signing up. Make sure to give them a mechanism for changing their interests, such as a link to their profile, in every e-mail.
Consumers tend to perceive e-mail that arrives too often as spam, so you need to figure out the frequency rate and timing of your e-mails. Frequency refers to the number of e-mails you send and the period of time in between each e-mail you send. Typical frequencies include
- Once
- Daily
- Weekly
- Bi-monthly, or every other week
- Monthly
Balancing the frequency of every e-mail message with the needs and expectations of your audience is more of an art than a science. According to a 2006 Epsilon Interactive consumer e-mail study, 73 percent of consumers will unsubscribe if they feel that a company sends e-mail too frequently. Consumers are willing to receive e-mails with almost any frequency as long as the content of the message remains relevant and valuable to them. Keep your content relevant to your consumers, and they most likely will remain happy with your frequency.
For example, a stock broker could probably get away with sending an e-mail twice per day to his subscribers if the message contains a single line of text announcing the current price of important stocks. The same stock broker would probably run into trouble, however, if he used the same mailing frequency to send a promotional e-mail asking his customers to invest in various stocks because not everyone is likely to make investment decisions with thatfrequency.
Even though proper frequency depends on relevant content, you should recognize the factors that most consumers consider to value the frequency of your e-mails. Consumers generally judge your e-mail frequency depending on the following:
- The total number of e-mails
- The length of each e-mail
- How often you ask them to take action
- The relevance of the information you provide
- The timing
Determining how many e-mails to send
Determining the proper number of e-mails to send is a fine balance: Send too many e-mail messages, and you overwhelm your audience with too many e-mails. Conversely, send too few, and you can overwhelm your audience with too much content in each one. The total number of e-mail messages that you send should match your consumer’s need for your information and not your need to send the information.
For example, a realtor might want to send dozens of e-mails over a period of weeks to people actively shopping for a home while sending only one e-mail per month to people who rent an apartment, with no immediate intentions of purchasing a home. Estimating the total number of messages your audience expects usually depends on two factors:
- The number of times your audience engages in a buying cycle If your prospects or customers purchase your products or services once per week, sending 52 e-mails per year is probably a good place to start with your frequency. If your prospects or customers take months or even years to make purchase decisions, you can base the number of e-mails you send on the number of times that they are likely to talk about their purchases with their peers. For example, if you sell once-in-a-lifetime vacations, you might create an affinity club for past vacationers and keep your customers talking about their experience by sending invitations to members-only social reunions four timesper year.
- The amount of information your audience needs to make a purchase decision
Some purchase decisions are easy for consumers to make, but others require much more consideration. If your audience requires a lot of information to justify a decision, the number of e-mails that you send should increase so you don’t overwhelm your audience with too much content in a few e-mails. Instead, send several e-mails with a bit of content in each one.
Estimating how many e-mails you need to effectively deliver all of your information might be as simple as dividing your information into equal parts or as complex as delivering successively greater amounts of content as your audience becomes more engaged.
Although paying attention to the needs of your audience is always the best policy, sometimes your e-mail content dictates the appropriate number of messages to send. For example, the total number of e-mails you send might depend on:
- The amount of change in your content: If your e-mails always have the same basic message, you don’t need to send as many as if your content were always fresh and new.
- The theme of your content: If your e-mail includes frequency in the theme, you can match the number of e-mails you send to that theme. For example, if your subscribers sign up for a daily motivational quote, you need to send 365 e-mails for the year, but delivering an annual reportrequires only 1 e-mail per year.
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