Why Limit The Number Of Marketing Emails?
Personal email inbox...professional email inbox...SMS! As individuals, we receive a monstrous amount of marketing communications every day. Whether we take the time to read them, file them, delete them, or ignore them (to the point of having email inboxes with thousands of unread messages), it is certain that we receive too much and that companies send far more than necessary!
Some Statistics On Email Marketing Campaigns
In 2021, a little less than 320 billion emails were exchanged every day around the world by more than 4 billion people! These figures, already staggering, will continue to increase in the years to come. The challenge for marketers is, therefore, to ensure that their communications do not drown in this huge mass! Beyond working on the subject line, on the pre-header, on the content, on the design, on A/B testing, and reflecting on the sender, the time and day of sending, the IP warm-up stage and of course the finesse of the targeting, it is also important to think about the number of emails that you are going to send.
Each Email Has An Ecological Impact
Sending and storing emails consumes energy, which has a carbon impact. In addition, emails often travel thousands of kilometers before arriving in the email box of your recipient. An email with images and attachments will have a greater impact than a simple email. Mike Berners-Lee estimates that in 2019, emails contributed 0.3% of the world's carbon footprint. By limiting marketing pressure and the sending of often useless emails, an organization participates not only in reducing its ecological impact but also in reducing that of its recipient, who may not have the reflex to delete an email that does not interest them.
Marketing Pressure Is An Optimization Axis That Must Be Taken Into Account
Whether in B2B or B2C, marketing professionals use email campaigns to send promotional communications to customers and prospects, as well as emails sent automatically thanks to a marketing automation solution. Marketing automation allows you to create sequences of emails that will be sent successively to a person according to an action they have performed. A typical example is the onboarding workflow, in other words the welcome journey, which will have the objective of engaging the client with the brand or the product, or to help use the solution.
A customer or prospect can therefore receive campaign-type communications while being in one or more marketing automation journeys (without knowing it, of course). The risk is of over-solicitation, which will have several effects:
- A low opening rate
- A degraded brand image
- Unsubscribes
- Reports as spam
More technically, the over-solicitation can have a lasting consequence and damage the reputation of your IP address, which will have an impact on the deliverability of your emails that will now be considered undesirable.
What Actions Should Be Taken To Limit Marketing Emails And Pressure?
First of all, there is no defined limit that the number of emails sent should not exceed over a period of time. This metric depends on your activity, the message, the interest levels of your prospects or customers, etc. It is mostly common sense.
Set Quantified Objectives For Marketing Campaigns
This may seem obvious, but in practice it is rare that we set the objectives for an emailing campaign beforehand. Yet this step will allow you to refine the message and the target. It can also be the gauge to limit marketing pressure. Why should you do this?
When sending a first email, it is common to resend to non-openers or non-clickers after a certain period of time. However, if the objectives of the campaign have already been reached, then why send new emails to people who were not interested in the first communication? For example, in the case of a webinar promotion, if the objective is set at 300 webinar registrants and the first email is sent one month in advance, if the objective has already been reached two weeks before the event, then there is no need to send a reminder.
Segment And Target Communications
Not all your communications may be relevant to all your contacts. It is therefore essential to segment your contact base to send them only the communications that are likely to concern them. For example, are inactive contacts who have not interacted with your emails for more than a year really potential readers of your monthly newsletter?
Optimize Marketing Automation Workflows
Automation workflows are also a lever to reduce marketing pressure and email sending. Here again, each path must serve a purpose: onboarding, lead nurturing, conversion etc. Segmentation is crucial in automation workflows. Just as important are the factors that will make your contacts leave your workflows (unsubscribe, a demo request, an order placed, etc.). By iterating and analyzing available statistics, it is possible to progressively add complexity to your journeys in order to make them more efficient, including by removing contact points that are not useful, or by personalizing certain branches of your journey.
Email marketing is the channel most used by marketers in their automation journeys. Things other than email should also be considered, of course, depending on the context. Most marketing automation tools offer task creation for your sales people, SMS sending, content personalization, etc., directly on the site. By diversifying the means of communication, you limit the marketing pressure of emails without reducing the number of interactions.
Facilitate Users' Unsubscribing
Mandatory thanks to the RGPD, the unsubscribe link is, wrongly, seen as a constraint on which the customer or prospect should never click. However, it only indicates that they are not interested in your communications and, in any case, they would surely never have engaged if they had not had the opportunity to unsubscribe. Unsubscribing will not prevent them from receiving transactional emails, and thanks to the implementation of a preference center, the user will always have the possibility of resubscribing. Don't hide your unsubscribe pages behind a login page either; on the contrary, simplify this process: someone who can't unsubscribe will report you as spam.
