Tom Lindmeier’s Blog @ MarketPlanB

The question of how often to mail the email list has been a hotly debated topic in every eCommerce business I have been associated with. Conventional wisdom is that you should deliver as often as you can. I tend to agree. My experience has been that the ceiling is more frequent than you can imagine. I have mailed up to three times a week. That’s 156 times a year.

But how you determine that maximum frequency rate? Here are the considerations I have frequently debated.

1. Opt-out Rates– If the opt-outs exceed opt-ins, you are obviously in trouble (duh). But you can’t necessarily link opt-outs to frequency. You’ll need to conduct a population test to determine where the trouble lies. Segment your mailings to 2 or 3 frequency rates and test. It takes time for fatigue to set in, you may need up to six months to test.
2. Response Degradation– You will most certainly reduce your response rates as you increase the frequency. However, in most cases, frequency will override response unless your degradation is precipitous. If you have enough history you can compare like offers by season. But again, you may need a population test.
3. Value Proposition– I have saved this for last because we tend not give it enough weight. We know that providing lightweight content and repeating the same offer will not be successful regardless of frequency. But as you increase frequency, the value proposition becomes more difficult to achieve if you haven’t increased your resource allocation. It seems that everyone is in the business of providing advice and information today and that only magnifies the challenge. Value comes from expert campaign planning, talented content developers and great execution. I have found that a prolific diversity of offers is the secret to campaign planning in the retail space. I will follow up with an article on campaign planning in the near future.

I will leave you with a tip for those of you who concerned that frequency is degrading your response. Right above the opt-out link in your emails, provide an option to decrease the frequency of mailings by 50%. You will decrease opt-outs by up to 30%.

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I don’t use the spam filter on my email program because I like to monitor best practices in email campaign planning, design and content. Why am I seeing that on any given day, as many as 40% of these emails have dead opt-out links? These emails are not from spammers, they are opt-ins from recognizable and sometimes major brands!

I know that this is not intentional, I suspect that it arises from a lack of discipline during testing procedures. If you’ve seen a sharp decrease in your opt-outs, I can guarantee that it is from a glitch in your opt-out system and not a result of your wonderful offers and outstanding creative.

If you want to assure that a prospect or customer will despise your brand, a dead opt-out is a very efficient method to get this accomplished.

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There was a very intelligent discussion on Cord Silversteins blog titled Engage Your Customers or Die where he asks the question: “Is it a good thing for companies to try to engage their customers online? Does the good outweigh the possible repercussions that could come from it?”. The repercussions were defined as the big bad things that can happen if you do not handle every instance right.

If you read my previous post on the Invisible Visitor, I maintained that that the route to understanding our customers is engagement. Once they become visible, you are then positioned to make strategic decisions that result in major marketing breakthroughs. So the question is not “if” you should engage but rather “how”.

I struggle to understand why some businesses come to fear their customers. Any business with even the best service standards faces an onslaught of touches with customers who have problems. This constant exposure to negatives is the only reason I can come up with for this fear. Yet these same businesses understand that turning a negative into a positive is one of the best ways to to create a loyal customer. The dedication to pursue this strategy is no easy task and requires a major commitment. Maybe this fear is just a manifestation of the weariness that comes from accommodating customers with what may seem to be unrealistic expectations.

Here’s my list of engagement tactics ranked by the quality of actionable information:

1. Requests for email input on your home page and other locations in your site
2. Blog within your domain
3. Reviews
4. Online chat
5. Search and response to blogs and portals outside your domain
6. Post-transaction online surveys
7. Post-product delivery email and package insert surveys
8. General surveys to email customer base with and without incentives

Note that tactics that are “open invitations” receive the highest quality rating. General surveys are preferred by most businesses because it makes it simple to quantify data, but they are of questionable value because they do not capture fresh information. Also, users want to be in control and do not prefer to respond to your controlled format.

I have received the best quality information with the open invitation to email. Junonia.com does a wonderful job of this by posting an invitation to email the president right on the home page. This results in a large quantity of responses and it requires a lot of effort on her part to respond in a timely manner. There is also a good deal of effort that goes into distributing it throughout the organization. But the quality of this information is invaluable and because it gets you closer to understanding your customers than any other method.

The solution to building forums that work is to define the proper set of expectations that narrow the focus to product and refer users with transaction problems to customer service where issues may be resolved in a more timely manner. For instance if you build a blog, you’re much better off inviting users to engage in the product development process.

Does your experience differ from my assertion?

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Anyone who manages or is an employee in a marketing department faces the constant demands of driving revenue. After celebrating a successful campaign you will hear the comment, “that’s great, but what have you done for me today?” There is a constant debate concerning short term gains and long term strategies. Unless you are blessed by leadership that always places priority on long-term strategies, the short term tactics always seem to win out. This can result marketing campaigns that hurt, rather than help the long-term viability of your business. A good example of this is squeezing in the extra email campaign. The tactic goes something like this: lets take our best campaign and do it better. The result may be something like this: let’s give ‘em free shipping and scream it louder.

With this in mind, it’s no wonder that successful email and banner advertising is facing diminishing returns. We have taken this viable form of advertising and ruined it for all. The cacophony of obnoxious screaming has caused users to completely ignore these forms of advertising. The only reason they still survive is because these programs are so cheap that substantial returns on investment are still possible. It won’t last long.

This brings me to the title of this article: Small Acts of Kindness. Here in Minnesota, we have recently have been deluged with rain (as well as the entire Midwest). My neighbor Brad has a sump pump in his house with a drainpipe mounted a few feet above ground that was eroding the ground underneath. The pumped water was flowing right back into the foundation. I took two minutes to go into my garage, grab some PVC pipe and mount it to move the flow of water away from the house. Two days later, Brad came bearing gifts. The generosity they extended (bottle of premium gin, case of premium beer and a great bottle of wine) was worth about $80. It was a very nice gesture for my two minutes of action.

I’ll leave you with a tactic that is a small act of kindness. The next time you plan to give away a widget for a purchase of $150 or more in an email campaign, do something different. Just give it way with no strings attached. Include it as a package insert and say “thank you for being our customer”. This may not give you extra revenue tomorrow, but it may give you 10 times the revenue over the coming months.

There is also another twist on this topic on Seth Godin’s Blog where he asks “If you didn’t want anything in return, nothing at all, what’s the most generous thing you could do for your best customer, your best friend, your most important prospect?”.

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