Email Marketing – Optimize Your Sending Schedule
by: Karen Scharf, Small Business Marketing
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As an email marketer, you probably spend considerable time testing and optimizing your email content, your email layout and design, the calls to action within your email message. You undoubtedly take great pains to ensure your message displays well with the “images off” default email client. You run through the CAN-Spam checklist and email pre-flight checklist before hitting the send button.
But do you ever stop to consider *when* you’re hitting the send button? I’m not referring to the best time of day or the best day of the week to send your message – although that is an important component to consider. When I’m referring to is your email campaign schedule.
When optimizing your email campaign, it’s important to take into consideration these scheduling details:
How often you will send an email
Sending too many email messages can easily lead to list fatigue. Sort of like the boy who cried wolf, your readers will soon ignore your messages and unsubscribe from your list if you over-saturate their inboxes. What’s even worse, they might report you as a spammer, which will affect your delivery rate to the entire ISP.
On the flip side, if you don’t send messages often enough, your readers won’t recognize your “From” address in their in-boxes. This, too, can cause them to ignore (i.e. delete) your message, unsubscribe from your list and/or report you as a spammer.
Sending an email when you have nothing to say
While it is important to send your message on a regular basis, it’s also important that you actually provide quality content to your readers. If your emails are strictly promotional or “forced”, your readers will soon recognize that there is no value in opening your messages. Again, they will either delete your messages without reading them, unsubscribe from your mailing list, or report you as a spammer.
If you are hard pressed for content for your email campaign, consider tapping into guest bloggers, industry experts, customer case studies, industry facts and statistics. You don’t need to come up with your own unique content for each and ever email issue. There are dozens of ways to supplement your message; it just takes a little digging.
It’s important that you test your sending schedule to determine the optimum balance. Once you’ve established the best schedule for you and your readers, it’s imperative that you stick to this schedule. If your email schedule is inconsistent, it’s easier for your readers to assume the message is spam.
By doing a little measuring and testing, you’ll easily be able to create an email marketing program to fit your target market and support your business needs.
