The above will no doubt be a familiar scenario for many who have commented on an acquaintances status or someone you know, without knowing most of their friends. The mass of irrelevant ‘comment’ emails that follow are pretty frustrating, causing many users to turn notifications off. Although turning off notifications would stop the flood of unwanted emails, it would also stop you being notified of comments you would be interested in.

Facebook have attempted to address this frequency and relevance issue and have announced the following:

Whilst the debate into the optimum frequency of send is normally applied to marketing emails, brands need to consider this issue even if they are ‘just sending notifications’ and ‘not trying to sell anything’.

Facebook is trying to sell its users something – a place to spend time whilst online. As such Facebook need to treat all emails as marketing emails and ensure they contain more relevant notifications at an appropriate frequency.

All users are different however and wish to be notified of activity to varying degrees.  It is good to see that Facebook is directing users to their preference centre, where users can decide the exact type and frequency of emails they receive – something all senders can learn from.

Facebook’s new found respect for its users is likely down to the emergence of its first main competitor in recent years: Google+.

For more information on the optimum frequency of sending emails, read Choosing the right email frequency by Sean Duffy.

Have you ever looked into how many of your email list ‘never’ open your emails? From our experience it can be anything from 40% to 70% of your list that do not open any of your emails, in many cases for 6 months.
So what can you do with this massive potential goldmine? Here are the options:

Do nothing

It takes time and effort to alter your strategy so even if these people are inactive and costing you money it might cost you more money to change your strategy.

And what if they come back to you in the future? Perhaps now is just not the right time for them.

Bin them

An alternative approach is to take them out of your list. It costs money to send to these people and out of all of your subscribers these are the most likely to report your email as spam.

There is a chance that these inactive subscribers will start responding, so it might be appropriate to keep them on the list, and perhaps just send to them less frequently.

My rule of thumb is this – if your emails are for frequent purchases, take the subscriber out – they are clearly not engaged. If however your offering is a seasonal purchase (Holidays, insurance or even tied to annual events such as Christmas or Valentines) then it is a different scenario, so keep sending but introduce triggered messages around key dates associated with the purchase (anniversary of purchase, renewal, welcome home from holiday) rather than focussing on generic one size fits all newsletters every week of the year.

Change approach

Just changing your style will reactivate people.

Instead of sending a long newsletter, try a simple ‘sorry we missed you’ message, discount voucher or even just change the ‘from’ name.

No matter what you change only a small amount of inactive subscribers will open your message – it’s always difficult to get subscribers back once they have disengaged from your email.

But if disengaged subscribers make up 50% of your list then the numbers should stack up to make your efforts worthwhile.

Of course prevention is better than cure. Perhaps a more important question should be what do we do to stop subscribers disengaging in the first place, but that is a topic for a different blog post.

Recently in my blog post “Choosing the right email frequency” I spoke about pressures on marketers to send more and more email and how that leads to list fatigue.

There are a number of factors to consider that will help you to choose what the right email frequency is and determine whether it is advisable to send that extra email.

First of all how often would someone purchase your product or service? If it is relatively infrequent then you cannot get away with a one email a week strategy like some retailers. Imagine receiving 52 emails throughout the year and you are only in a position to take up the wonderful offers for maybe a 3 week period when you are looking for a holiday. You can see why it can be too much.

This example not only relates to holidays but purchases ranging from annual car insurance through to buying a car. The approach to take here is to increase the frequency when you know it is of interest (when people sign-up, request a brochure, click on a link in an email etc) rather than blast throughout the year.

Another factor is making sure you send when you have something worthwhile to say. Again different people will put a different value on your emails but this is perhaps where you can allow people to choose how often they want to hear from you. This could be daily email alerts versus a weekly or monthly digest.

Then there are those people that never open your emails or have not purchased anything in a long time. It does not make sense to carry on bombarding these people with a high frequency as it will only lead to a negative association with your brand and complaints. It might work in your favour to send infrequent emails as these at least will be of novelty value and perhaps catch the eye.

Your boss comes along with the need to send an email to your customer database with a fantastic special offer. Having already sent an email that week you are concerned you might be bombarding your customers but he is the boss and at least it is a great offer.

So you send the email and the campaign is a great success. The next week at the department meeting the results of the emails sent the previous week are discussed and it has been the best sales week for email ever. So as the two emails led to this record week you now have to send two emails a week to the database.

As a couple of months go by there is some evidence that customers are fed-up with so many emails based upon comments coming via the customer services department. One week you persuade the powers that be to not send the second email. However sales are down as a result so you must carry on sending two a week.

Weeks go by and open and click rates are falling but this is put down to a variety of factors such as ageing data and managers question whether the emails are getting through as the reason for this steady decline. You raise the possibility that people switch off from your brand if you send too many emails but management say the pain of losing those sales by not sending the second email is too much. Anyway unsubscribe rates are only 0.3% so that cannot be it they say.

I have personally seen this in dozens of organisations. It is the classic mistake senior managers make in interfering with email strategy. They see the short term benefits of increasing frequency but not the long term damage.

Lets pull out the specific mistakes made by senior management from the scenario above:

1) Low unsubscribe rates

Everyone has low unsubscribe rates, even spammers! The effort to unsubscribe involves opening an email, enabling the links if they are blocked, scrolling to the bottom to find the unsubscribe link and after clicking still potentially having to login or complete another set of actions. As shown in our research paper “Consumer views on email marketing” consumers find it much easier in their busy lives to delete and ignore emails.

2) Open and click rates are falling because…

People which don’t really understand email immediately think that lower response rates are because your email is getting picked up by spam filters. Nope, 9 times out of 10 this is not the case. If you see a sudden drop off then yes deliverability issues could well be the case. However where the trend is over a period of time then it is far more likely that you are sending rubbish, irrelevant emails far too often. Think about if you received 3 emails in a row in the space of a week from a company and none of them were of interest or particularly relevant – would you open future emails? Probably not and that is why response rates fall.

3) “If I don’t send that extra email I will lose those sales”

In the short-term this statement is true. But what if you measure the long-term impact on open, click and conversion rates?

Here is a little case study that proves the fallacy in sending the extra email.

toptable.com, a restaurant booking service religiously sent users two emails a week. If they only send one then sales halve.

To measure the long term impact of the increased frequency a control group of half the new customers that joined that month were held back from the second send.

After three months this control group was measured against those who had joined the site at the same time yet received the default setting of two emails a week. Open rates were 86% higher, unsubscribe rates 57% lower.

But the main stat that proves why sending too many emails leads to long term damage – those receiving only one email a week had made 14% more bookings than those receiving two emails over that three month test period.

Why? Too many emails can lead to a customer dis-engaging with your brand, losing them as a customer.