By Paul Tenney, CEO of Ematic Solutions
It’s Holiday Time, and that means marketers worldwide are warming up their servers and preparing to bombard inboxes with billions upon billions of promotional messages. From Black Friday to Cyber Monday (and we’re hearing whispers of Cyber Saturday now) to the 12 days of Christmas, most marketers view this time of year as license to throw out the best practices, open up the spigots and blast their entire audience with one promotion after another.
It almost seems inevitable – consumers are ready to buy, and every promotional email you send out seems to return multiples of revenue vs what it was getting you just weeks ago! So queue up another message, blast it out and let the good times roll, right? Well if you want to miss all the real revenue opportunities, be my guest! However, we’d argue that this Holiday Season, sticking to your best practices is going to be more important than ever and that you can make a lot more money by sending less email. Better yet, most marketers should have all the tools needed to execute this simple strategy right at their fingertips…if only you will have the patience to use it!
Before we get into the reasons why you should be getting even more targeted with your mailings during the Holidays, let’s look at a poorly understood and nearly impossible to measure phenomenon called “fatigue.” The email subscriber lifecycle is well known: new subscribers open and click your emails at double the rate of someone you’ve already sent 50 emails to. Every time you send an email that a subscriber doesn’t engage with (open or click) you “fatigue” the user and the propensity to engage with your next mailing goes down. Eventually, if you keep blasting away this user will tune you out completely even if they don’t unsubscribe, resulting in “dead weight” in your email database. Over time, this results in lower open and click rates, and dramatically lower ROI as you spend more money to make incrementally less.
The simple solution is to understand this effect, and proactively give users a break when you see fatigue setting in! How? It’s simple: if users haven’t responded to your emails at all for, say, 10 consecutive blasts, exclude them from your daily mailings and only hit them once a week with your best promotion. If that doesn’t work after a month, only send those users a communication once or twice a month until they engage again. By giving them a break, when they DO see your email again it will be more likely to pique their interest, and you can improve a user’s “propensity to engage” by taking it easy when you know they’ve tuned you out. Most marketers will see a simple strategy like this double their click rates or more, and not only the click rates will improve but you’ll drive more traffic to your site (and hence more sales overall) by managing frequency based off of behaviour to set an appropriate contact strategy for every user.
Now you might say, “sure, we could try that when it’s not the holiday season, but right now we just have to blast to everyone we possibly can.” Well, I say, no, no NO! The time is right, right now, to pour a tall glass of discipline for yourself and start doing it right. Here are the three reasons to send less email this holiday season:
Reason #1: Cutting through the clutter starts with not creating your own clutter
Okay, so you know that inboxes everywhere are overflowing with promotional emails and many of them from your competitors. You think: I need to keep sending more email so that they’ll see MY email among the hundreds of others. I would argue that the way to stand out is to be like a diamond in the rough: if it’s been a day since I checked my promotions tab in Gmail, and I see three emails from Reebonz in there, guess what I’ll do? Ignore all three – which one should I even look at? What you don’t want to do is create your own clutter, and start competing with yourself in the inbox when the users see emails from your company stacking up! This is the first and fastest way to ensure that users tune you out all the way through the Holidays.
Reason #2: If users aren’t responding, give them a little break and you will have a chance to make a sale
As Holiday Season moves on, you will have already done some serious damage to your audience if you’ve been mailing every day, or sometimes even twice a day. Fatigue has set in, and users are tuning you out. Now, not all of your users have tuned you out, so as long as users are engaged, by all means, keep sending them emails! But if they aren’t opening and aren’t clicking, now (right now!) is the time to give them a break. One week off will do wonders, and the next time they hear from you they’ll be much more likely to check out your email than they would if you kept blasting every day. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Reason #3: The damage done to your database during Holiday can be permanent
I have seen companies that did so much damage during the Holiday Season that they literally never recovered. Remember, Holiday is a great time to make money, but if you can’t deliver any returns in January because you completely alienated your entire user base in November and December, your job is going to be on the line. Fatigue can annihilate your 2015 plans, and remember that almost 80% of your users are going to be subscribed to your email list next year too, so make sure you don’t get the short-term blinders on so tightly that you destroy the long-term value of their email database. The other thing I have seen happen during holiday time is that the tactics become terminal: marketers get used to the great returns during Holiday time and they forget to back off once the Holiday’s are over. This lands you squarely in what I call “The Batch and Blast Trap” and it will condemn you to declining open rates, click rates and sales forever.
Conclusion:
Now, perhaps this is obvious, but it needs to be mentioned: if you are using an Email Service Provider (ESP) that charges you based off of the number of emails sent, you are going to waste a TON of money sending emails that nobody is going to read. This will most certainly affect your bottom line, and it can eat into your ROI severely. ESP’s love this time of year – Black Friday is as true for them as it is retailers and e-Commerce players. Instead of handing over your hard earned money to them, just dial back the volume and watch your KPI’s skyrocket.
Okay – I’m issuing a challenge to all you marketers out there: I am not going to open your emails for one week from Black Friday through Cyber Monday and right on to Black Friday too. If you are smart enough to see this as a sign to reduce the frequency of your messaging to me to just once per week during the Holiday Season, I’ll buy something from you! Now that I’ve said it, recognize that the rest of your users, implicitly, feel the same way.
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