Managing email marketing can feel like a daunting task for any business. How often do you send emails? What promotions do you include? What content are your consumers interested in? After all the hard work to make these decisions, months or even years later, your company could be faced with the unfortunate signs of email fatigue, which is when a consumer feels overwhelmed by the amount of correspondence they receive from your business. Email fatigue can significantly affect the relationship you have with your subscribers.
How do You Know if Your Email Marketing may be Suffering from Email Fatigue?
If you are experiencing a decrease in engagement with your emails, this could be an indication that your audience is falling out of love with your communication. CoSchedule’s infographic on email marketing showed that 45.8 percent of survey participants marked a company’s email as spam because they emailed too often.
Respondents reiterated this sentiment with 43.9 percent saying companies could improve their emailing efforts with less frequent emails. It can’t get much clearer than that! Consumers are feeling overwhelmed by clingy companies vying for their attention (and money) and they are offering an ultimatum: give them space or this relationship is over.
Upping Your Email Marketing Frequency Game
Adjusting the frequency of emails cold turkey can be difficult. It is a well established aspect of email marketing that there is no magic number of correspondence to send per month to make a consumer feel catered to while not overwhelming their inbox. The 2018 Global Email Benchmark Report found that companies sent anywhere from three emails a month to 25. Businesses can try testing different frequencies until they hit the right balance or alleviating email fatigue could be as simple as giving the consumer control over their inbox. But how do you go from a stage five clinger to the most suave email marketer they have ever seen?
4 Tips For Improving Email Marketing Fatigue
1. Establish a preference center.
Preference centers are spaces where your consumer can indicate how often they want to receive your emails. Usually there are time options to choose from such as “once a week” or “twice a month” or additional content options. Preference centers allow the subscriber to tell your business how much they want to hear from you, instead of forcing them into an all or nothing relationship, which can cause them to unsubscribe if your “all” is too much. Spotify has a fantastic preference center as an example.
2. Establish the preference center at the beginning.
Start your relationship off right by allowing the subscriber to choose their frequency from when they first sign up for your email marketing mailing list. By giving the subscriber this option up front it will establish a good rapport from the beginning of the relationship.
3. Follow up with subscribers that have declining engagement.
Maybe they thought they wanted to hear from you once a week or they didn’t indicate a preference at all. If subscribers start to decrease their engagement, send them a follow up email reminding them that they can control their email frequency. This will allow the consumer to change their preference without them feeling like their only way out is to unsubscribe all together. SendGrid gives a great example of the perfect Preference Center Email here.
4. Direct them to your social media.
Just because a consumer does not want to receive emails from you, does not mean you have to lose all contact with them. Directing them to your social media allows them to interact with your business in a more casual way, giving them the space they need without you losing their viewership. If they unsubscribe, send them a generated message to confirm their updated subscription and include information about your social media accounts before respecting their wishes for an email free relationship.
We all know that breakups can be hard, so try to give your customer options to keep them interested. Our team of content and email marketing experts are happy to help your business get on track if you need some guidance. Schedule a consultation with us here.
Special Offer:
Sign up for a complimentary consultation during December and receive an Annual Marketing Planning Guide valued at $475! We offer a 30-minute phone consultation with our CEO, and can answer your questions and discuss your specific marketing needs - no strings attached. Call 408-218-2391 or contact us today to arrange your consultation!