In most of my conversations with email marketers, frequency and timing questions are raised at some point or another. "How often should I send email to my customer base? What day of the week or time of day should I send emails to my customers?" However, with the tools and data now available to marketers ... are frequency and timing questions really on target? Or are we missing the point altogether?

Technology now allows marketers to deliver relevant messages to a highly targeted audience. CRM systems enable the creation of customer segments based on a broad array of data including demographic, geographic and behavioral data. Websites provide the ability to capture data and react in real-time. Email provides the ability to deliver messages tailored to the individual through dynamic content. Nevertheless, many marketers are still using email to simply "batch and blast" messages out to consumers.

In general, email marketing is used to do one of two things: drive immediate results or cultivate future results. Those using email to send periodic offers with the intent of driving immediate sales are in the first category. The approach is pretty straight forward--it's basically catalog or direct mail through a less expensive medium. In direct mail, marketers send offers to a list, or segment, that is likely to be more responsive than the average population and wait for the results. However, with email, the list is comprised of people who have opted-in, or elected, to get offers from your company or brand. So, by definition, it is a good list, right? Again, this misses the point.

Hunting vs. Farming

Seth Godin recently spoke at ExactTarget's User Conference. He used hunting and farming to illustrate the difference between old versus new marketing paradigms. As new technologies develop, the customers' control over the messages they receive increases. If they want to ignore you, they can--the days of hunting are gone. Marketers now need to learn how to farm.

I asked a farmer about some of the nuances of harvesting a crop. Obviously, farming is governed by the seasons, but I did not know that the profitability of a crop can change dramatically in as little as twenty-four hours.  Such is the case with one of this farmer's fruit crops.  One day the fruit is at peak value, but for each day that passes the value decreases rapidly.  Within a week, the crop can be completely worthless. Farmers inspect their crops every day and need to be ready to harvest at a moment's notice.

So what does this imply in terms of the frequency with which we should be sending email? In short, communications should be sent everyday! I am not advocating spamming your customer database everyday, but I am encouraging sending properly timed and relevant messages. At any point in time, there are customers on your database who are preparing to buy the product or service that you offer. The difficult part is sending those customers the right message at the right time in order to close the deal.

At the same time, avoid sending irrelevant, poorly timed messages to the rest of your customers. When looking at email registrant interaction over time, we see that registrants become disengaged quickly when they receive only what you want to send them. "Database fatigue" occurs one customer at a time. If they do not get engaged early, they will learn to ignore you. 

Research conducted for ExactTarget clients suggests the decision to engage with or ignore messages from a marketer is made within the first six to eight emails and that 50% or more of most email databases are completely disengaged.

Cultivation

David Daniels of Jupiter Research recently wrote an article suggesting that the "F-Word" should be removed from marketers' vocabulary. Only marketers are concerned about frequency. Consumers want to receive messages when they are relevant. Thus, marketers should build email programs around specific events or lifecycles. However, this leads to questions about how to keep the customer engaged in a dialog that provides the necessary actions upon which to respond.

At the beginning of the email relationship you do not know what is going to engage any given customer. Collecting limited information during the registration process helps get the relationship started in the right direction, but should not be taken completely at face value.  First, customers consistently provide inconsistent information. Second, just because I was interested in electronics today, doesn't mean I will be interested in those same products tomorrow.

Unless the registration is tied to a specific buying cycle, initial emails should be geared toward engaging the customer and determining where their interests lie. Frequency should be determined by the customers' level of engagement.  If they are opening and clicking-through, increase the frequency slightly by sending information or promotions in the demonstrated areas of interest. If they are not engaging, decrease the frequency and broaden the scope of the message.

Once you are able to determine their level of engagement and the topics or items of interest, you can start focusing on closing deals. To do so, content needs to be ready to go out without delay. Running an online retail site? If a customer clicks-though to your website and then abandons their shopping cart, have an e-mail out in the same day to re-engage them in the purchase. Running a ski-resort? When a customer clicks-through to your snow report, send them a follow-up with purchase information on a lift ticket.

So why not just include these promotions in your standard email? The original email is intended to qualify leads, allowing you to provide brief messages on a wider range of topics to identify interests. Follow-up emails are used to close the deal through highly personalized messages.

Shifting Paradigms

Fortunately, the dot-bomb experience has shifted the attention of marketers back to measurable results and achieving reasonable ROI. Due to the comparatively low cost of email the ROI is consistently higher than other marketing channels. However, this does not mean that email efforts have been optimized.

Many are singing the praises of relevance these days with good reason.  In a recent study for The Home Depot, open rates doubled and click through rates quadrupled when relevant messages were sent to subscribers who had visited selected sections of their website. Similar tests have reported up to eight times the response for highly relevant messages. Clearly, the value of email is not simply in cost-effectiveness of the channel, but in the capability to track engagement and deliver well timed and relevant messages.

There are several challenges marketers face if they want to shift paradigms. First, it is a break from tried and true direct marketing tactics. Second, it takes a lot of planning and preparation. Having been involved in several of these planning sessions, I am the first to acknowledge this. However, the results are compelling. Anyone can pick-up a shotgun and go nuts. Cultivation yields consistent and predictably better results...so start farming!

About the Author

As director of strategic services, Morgan Stewart is responsible for database and email marketing strategy, testing, and segmentation and benchmarking analysis.

Send Morgan an email at mstewart@exacttarget.com