Email Frequency and Relevance: The Instant E-Newsletter
Roy H. Williams, benefactor of the enigmatic business school The Wizard Academy has a simple formula that you should study:
“Salience” is that magical moment when your message enters your prospects’ long-term memory. It means your message will not be swept from the short-term memory that most marketing messages float in.
Relevance is simply how important your message is to a prospect’s current problems. Messages gain relevance when they are helpful, educational, titillating or entertaining.
Frequency is the number of times someone is exposed to your message.
The enemies of Relevance, then are messages exclusively about your promotions, your company or your products, or messages sent to infrequently.
The enemies of frequency are lack of repetition and invisibility. Social media messages have very short lifespans. Thus, for most people, they are invisible. The ubiquitous Leo Laporte complains that, when his posts suddenly stopped appearing on Google Buzz and Twitter, that no one noticed. He didn’t even notice for two weeks.
Email for Salience
Email is highly visible. It is the biggest social network on the planet. Most business professionals spend their day in email. It is how they managing their work.
If email is not working for you, it is probably because of low frequency. Email is a personal medium, and we all are afraid of being seen as spammers by sending too much email.
So, you need relevance in your email content.
frequency x relevance = salience
See how easy that was?
Expertise: conversion rate optimization, AB testing, marketing strategy, digital marketing, analytics, landing page design, computer programming, entrepreneurship
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Books and Training: Your Conversion Creation Equation, Video CRO, Marketing Videos that Convert, CRO Best Practices
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Education: Texas A&M University, BS Computer Science and Management
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It is hard to find the right balance of frequency. I have had people unsubscribe because I emailed once a week saying it was too much. I’ve had people unsubscribe because I took a month off and when they got the next email, they said I didn’t email enough. You can’t satisfy everyone – you just have to find a balance between getting your word out and not driving away all of your subscribers.
Kristi, while it is ideal to find the right frequency, 90% of my clients are sending too rarely. You want certain people to leave your list, those that aren’t qualified or won’t be buyers. It is called list shaping. I’d rather lose 100 of the “your emailing too much” than 1 of the “I wish you’d educate me more” list members.
Thanks so much for posting.