It’s August 2020 and our scales are showing the effects of the extra food and alcohol consumed while staying home. People now refer to their pandemic pounds and the quarantine 15. We have fattened our curves while flattening the curve.
The extra calories are understandable. We’ve been stressed out, seeking comfort and baking bread. We’ve found solace in the kitchen, but our waistlines have paid a price.
And that’s the nice thing about weight gain, right? You can see the direct correlation between calories in and pounds on—or alternatively calories avoided and pounds lost.
As someone using enterprise email marketing tools, you can use a similar direct correlation to find out if you’re over messaging your list.
Too Many Emails Is Like too Much Candy
Using a bulk email service for email marketing continues to deliver the highest ROI of any marketing channel, but that can mean it could be tempting to send emails too often.
It’s like candy in a bowl. It’s quick and easy to grab plus it tastes good. Even though we know it’s bad for us and it’s loaded with empty calories, we succumb to our temptations and eat, even more, continuing to dip our hands into the bowl while justifying our actions with thoughts like “it’s just a few more” or “I’m stuck at home and I deserve a little treat.”
It can be the same with email marketing via your email marketing software. It’s easy to do yet another email marketing campaign to your contact lists of potential customers and past customers and hope for some quick sales. We keep going back for more, ignoring the potentially negative long-term effects of emailing too frequently…just like dipping our hands back into the candy bowl.
What’s that, you say? How can eating too much candy and emailing more frequently both be bad for you? Because one leads to weight gain, and the other leads to subscriber loss. Email your list too often and you’ll burn out your list. People will either unsubscribe or delete your emails without opening them or even report you as spam. Yes, even people who opted in initially will want out if you’re annoying them by sending bulk emails too often.
How to Know If You’re Sending Too Many Emails in Marketing Campaigns?
A good indicator that you or your marketing team might be sending too many emails to your list is your unsubscribe rate. If you see it go up, that could mean you’re emailing people more often than they want to hear from you. Of course, not everyone will unsubscribe. Many people will just delete your emails. Some will report you as spam. So be extra sensitive when the unsubscribe rate does go up since that’s only a portion of the people you are annoying.
Although numbers vary depending on which research you find, people do unsubscribe when companies email them too frequently. This Hubspot post claims that the number can be as high as 51% while SmarterHQ says 83% of Millennials surveyed say they unsubscribe due to too many emails.
Finding the Right Mass Email Frequency
Does this seem counterintuitive? Surely if email offers the best ROI then more email means more ROI, right?
Emailing more frequently often increases ROI. Sometimes it doesn’t. You have to find the right cadence for your audience. But what counts as too many depends on the subscriber. And that’s where your enterprise email marketing platform can help you segment your audiences, so those who want to hear from you more can, and those that don’t will not.
Time for a new Email Service Provider?
And if you’re not using an email platform that lets you make such distinctions, it might be time for a new Email Service Provider?
As far as the candy goes, watch the level in the bag or bowl. It’s the opposite of your unsubscribe rate.
If the level of candy in the bowl is going down, obviously your intake is going up. So let’s keep the level of candy in the bowl high and the unsubscribe rate low instead. And don’t worry about those pandemic pounds. As they say, we’re all in this together, and when we get to a new normal, we’ll tackle those pounds.
