Overdosing on Email Campaigns

Are you obsessed with sending out mass emails to your customer list or subscriber list? If you are, you aren’t alone. If you aren’t, thank you.

Using email as a tool for marketing is a great way to communicate with your customer base. Commonly referred to as email blasts, which are emails sent to a large group of people, customers and subscribers of websites and businesses today are often bombarded with an overload of emails. Email blasts are being sent from every direction to consumers today – for advertising, customer feedback, events, special announcements, and more. Small business owners tend to love email blasts because it is a cheap yet often effective way to communicate what is going on with their business. However, too many retailers and wholesalers are abusing this luxury by overdosing their use of email blasts.

Here are a few things to consider next time you plan to send an email marketing campaign out to your email list.

1. Why are you sending out an email?
2. what is the purpose of the message in the email?
3. When was the last time you sent out an email blast?
4. When do you plan to send out an email blast again?
5. Is the email you plan to create going to excite your audience? How?

These five simple questions can help keep you in check with why your email blast is worth sending out or not. By answering these questions, you are able to really evaluate how you are using emails to communicate with your audience. Remember to always consider when the last time and the next time you think you will send an email out because if you are doing it too often, your audience may not take your emails very seriously. Just ask yourself the last time you deleted an email without opening it because you knew there was nothing of value in it for you. Or was there? Unfortunately, if you overdose on your email privleges, your audience may not take your emails seriously and begin deleting them without ever reading them.

It’s impossible for me to tell you exactly how often is too much or too little for you to use emails as part of your marketing strategy, however I would definitely recommend no more than once a week and ideally no more than twice a month. These details should ultimately be a reflection of what is going on with your business at any particular time, though. It’s always a good idea to get customer feedback on any marketing approach, so in your next email blast you may want to ask your audience how often they’d like to get emails from you. This is a great opportunity to gain other insightful information, as well, such as what products they love or hated in 2009, what is motivating them to shop, and more.

Please note that email blasts can often be used for blogs, which allow the subsribers to know there is an updated post. When you receive an email that lets you know there is an updated post, there is a quick and simple purpose to this email that seperates this from the email blasts I was referring to above. Email campaigns are used to highlight details that are not part of your normal outreach. For bloggers, normal outreach would be emails notifying your subscribers of new posts. So if this is something you do, your subscribers should be comfortable with the amount of emails they get as a direct connection to the blogs you are posting.

Remember that each business is unique in itself, therefore your email marketing strategies must be unique, as well. Use the ideas mentioned above as support in your own marketing initiatives to help make your individual retail or wholesale business as successful as it can be.