Adventures in Mobile Marketing

Contact Frequency

In a seminar hosted by Strongmail yesterday, I heard some surprising notes about contact frequency, basically, if your inventory can support daily emails, do them.

Daily!

I’ve noticed some retailers doing the daily thing- namely Macy’s during Christmastime- but didn’t think much of it. My concerns about daily contact are:

What kind of customer are you creating? A “bargain basement” sales scout? Someone who reads each email carefully? Or do you numb them into just noticing the brand, seeing products, and skipping to the next email? Maybe I’m naive and creating a CRM relationship with your customer- the long tail- is just a dream.

Of course testing is key. A member of the audience at the seminar noted that they had several clients, and tested, and basically if there were a large variety of products that could create new content each day, the revenue went up. I think this bears more testing, because instinct says that the unsubscription flow from heightened frequency would disprove any revenue boost. In other words: you could get more out of your list in the long run if you grew it out and didn’t get rid of folks who wanted lower frequency.

Results of the test would populate this criteria:

1 year, contact each day ? in revenue ? unsubscription
1 year, contact 3X a week, personalized & targeted, relationship emails ? in revenue ? unsubscription

The idea is that the emails you send out are directly relating to behaviors in ordering, browsing, and other online services, and not just promotional advertising. Those revenues increase because the opens/clicks increase, because the customer is more engaged and interested in relevant, targeted emails.

In some clients I have noticed transactional opens and clicks up to 40%, while promotional opens linger around 0-10%. If you up the frequency, you get higher numbers, but are those customers trained to be high level, valuable customers that have higher average spends? Higher brand loyalty? More engagement?

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Written on Thursday, 07. February 2008 at 08:09 In the category campaigns, transactional emails. Follow the comments via RSS here: RSS-Feed. Read the Comments. Trackbacks- Trackback on this post. Share on FriendFeed

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5 Comments »

  1. Emailing daily doesn’t make sense to me. It seems like such a shotgun approach to email, for the exact reasons you point out. I know that the only reason I’d stay subscribed to a list doing that would be purely to observe their creative/copy (Bluefly, I’m looking at you).

    Did anyone at that seminar address segmenting — how they go about it (if at all) when they’re busy creating that many emails? Seems it would be hard to do much behavioral targeting for so many campaigns – unless you had some pretty deep pockets to pay for the time/people needed, and even then I have my doubts about whether daily campaigns would ultimately be the best use of those resources.

    Comment: Justin Premick – 07. February 2008 @ 12:41 pm

  2. Good point about segmentation. In the tool I use for segmentation- Epiphany- you an use once and copy across many campaigns. But doing a daily frequency that hits all users, and isn’t transacitonal or behavior-based, it would be a lot of work to manually segment.

    I really wonder at their unsubscribe rates. Also, if they have a preference center with frequency as an option. Again, what kind of customer selects ‘daily” for emails? I can’t think of one person that would click that option, and if you leave it as the default, that’s not very nice to the rest (majority?) of the subscribers.

    Comment: banane – 07. February 2008 @ 5:28 pm

  3. That is a great point! What type of customer are you trying to serve is critical. Also, what type of list? You might have numerous lists and some might be better served, and much less annoyed, by getting coupons once a week or once per month. Why not just ask people when they sign up how often they want their info. Segment them not just by zip code and geo, but by frequency.

    Then you just need to watch your metrics carefully. Ramp up some while others ramp back if the metrics say that recipients are getting annoyed.

    Comment: Rob Thrasher – 08. February 2008 @ 11:31 am

  4. The ironic thing is that Strongmail doesn’t even support contact frequency management. The software offers no capability whatsoever to manage number of touches by email type by time period. I’ve tried to implement this with Strongmail and it’s been a nightmare working with our technology team to get it to work… purely impossible.

    Comment: Mike Pfleuger – 17. February 2008 @ 10:03 pm

  5. The only real feature I’ve seen to manage contact frequency, is to setup a filtering on email content, campaign type, etc. So if you’ve ever received “Promo1″ before, you can’t get this one, or if you’ve been emailed this week, or in the past few weeks, or some time period.

    Not sure your data size, but when you get really large systems the ESPs tend to create homemade SQL management of frequency- or just institute a “never email someone twice today” blanket rule.

    Mostly I recommend a simple frequency control, like once or twice a week send promotional campaigns- which is almost all anyone can muster with the creative resources anyway! Never limit frequency on transactional, except for redundancy and duplication.

    Not to defend Strongmail- I have little if any knowledge about their systems beyond that one seminar! I’m interested, though, in what your desired state would be for contact frequency.

    Anna

    Comment: banane – 17. February 2008 @ 10:26 pm

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