Whenever I’m working on frequency for client email campaigns, this R.E.M. song always runs through my mind…
As marketers, we should always be thinking about the email recipient’s experience.
By that I mean the experiences they have with
- each email we send
- every campaign we deploy
- all the emails that come from our brand,
- and whatever else they receive in their inbox.
Is that a tall order? Yes it is. But that single email or campaign you send doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
For instance…
I have a client with a library of online courses; registrants receive free access to about 20% of the courses and partial access to the rest. The free access provides a taste of the content which helps drive the upsell to a paid subscription.
When I started working with them, they had an automated 9-effort email journey which was sent to free registrants to drive the upsell. The first effort sent was a welcome when they registered. It had what I think of as ‘housekeeping’ information – your username, your password, an email address to contact support, etc. No mention was made of the upsell.
The second effort was sent 11 days later – nearly 2 weeks after the recipient’s free access had begun. It included an impressive offer – 64% off the regular price for the full access 1-year subscription.
I asked about the time lag – 11 days is a long time to wait between emails when you’re looking to build a relationship with a new prospect who was interested enough in your brand to give you their email address. The client said they wanted free access registrants to have time to explore the online library on their own before we tried to sell to them. Fair enough, I’m not a fan of pushing hard for the upsell right away. In their mind, the recipient’s email experience over their first 12 days of free access looked like this:
Now, there are pros and cons here, things we can and will discuss in later blog posts. But let’s focus on the experience… more specifically the frequency (number of emails sent) and cadence (time between the sends).
I had signed-up for free access (my first contact with the brand) and been receiving emails from them for a little more than two weeks. You saw above what the brand thought my experience would be over the first 12 days.
In reality, my experience was this:
During the period they thought they were giving me to explore the library without being sold to (and without even receiving an email from them), days 1 to 10, I received a total of 8 messages from their brand. In 4 of these, half of the messages, the offer was a discount on the online library; one of the other emails offered the online library for free with the purchase of another product. Here’s the overview:
- On the very first day of my free access, I was offered a full year’s subscription to the online library for free if I purchased another of their products
- Over the 10-day period, I received 4 messages to sell me the online library at a 50% discount
- And the other 3 messages were inviting me to attend a free event.
I wonder if I would have received even more email if there weren’t a federal holiday during this period.
Notice that on 2 of these days, I received not 1 but 2 email messages from the brand.
Was the client surprised to see my actual experience versus the experience they thought I would have?
Yes. Very. They were shocked. They had not taken into account all the other email being sent to people who opt-in for the free access.
So, what’s the recommendation here?
Short term: if your plan is to offer a ‘quiet period’ of no selling to a portion of your subscribers, or to otherwise contain the experience to a single campaign, be sure to suppress this group from all other email messages your brand is sending.
Long term: we’re in the process of reworking the upsell journey, including frequency, cadence, content, and calls-to-action. Watch my blog to see the recommendations we put in place – and how they perform.
