No one loves a full inbox after subscribing to one newsletter or promotional deal. More than likely, the organization’s emails will “drip” out to you across several weeks before you become ”unengaged” (or you unsubscribe).
Drip email campaigns, as they’re called, trickle out to readers often through signing up for a promotional deal, downloading a gated resource, attending an event, etc. Organizations often strategically plan and entice readers to revisit their website, purchase those items sitting in your virtual cart, or just a “hey, remember us?” nudge via email.
How Many Drip Campaign Emails Are “Too Many?”
Companies are wise to the fact that daily messages would get an instant “unsubscribe” response. Instead, standard email campaigns are often anywhere from 4-10 emails long and can span weeks or even months. These campaigns are often called “lead nurturing” campaigns and their email cadence can be automated to make it simple for marketing teams to implement. This automation may be why some emails or offers you receive are not specifically targeted to your interests or needs.
While email can be informational or provide a unique service/promotion for the end user, these email campaigns feed the company information on their subscriber habits. Are you enticed by a 20% coupon? Is there a pattern to subject lines that prompted multiple contacts to click (or unsubscribe)?
Actions you take as the end user can trigger a few different responses. Most often, if you take no action or don’t engage with these emails, you’ll move to a list of unengaged or “dead” leads after a period of time, whether it be 4 months to a year. If you reply, click, or otherwise trigger a notifiable response for the company, you may move over to a more engaged list of users and will remain in their primary lists to maintain contact.
Optimizing Your Email Cadence for Better Engagement
Think about your own email inbox habits. Do those subscription emails that hit your inbox and bypass your spam or promotional filters stay unread or get sent straight to the Archive abyss? If you’ve made a past purchase with this organization or company, what about the email prompted you to open or not click? For many, the answer is that there are too many emails overall. Timing and email cadence are key to ensuring that your users stay engaged and don’t fatigue to your overall messaging. Here are some things you can test with your email lists:
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- How many emails per week get high engagement? Consider adjusting send frequency to allow for more days between emails if your engagement drops off later in the series.
- Do emails on a particular day of the week get higher opens or clicks?
- Analyze your subject lines and teaser/preview text. How much should you reveal to entice users to click?
- If long-term engagement is the goal, mix up the type of information you share. Whether it be promotional, educational, re-engagement, or surveys, testing out different email styles can be helpful to understand your primary email audience.
Lastly, determine at what point you need to cut your losses and move these contacts out of your main email stream. Why is this important? Having unengaged contacts can hinder your sending reputation, throw off your engagement rates/numbers, and can also trigger spam filters that impacts other contacts who many be more engaged. Some email software or CRMs can automatically create triggers that drop unengaged contacts out of your email workflow. Other times, a weekly or monthly manual review of your opens, clicks, or unsubscribes can help you pull out those unengaged contacts and maintain a clean lead list.
Is Your Solution Segmentation?
Another key strategy for email marketing success is segmentation and ensuring your leads stay in the right workflow. Someone who submitted an inquiry form may have different needs or expectations than someone who signed up for a promotional deal or made a purchase. A user who signed up for a newsletter may be more inclined to accept higher frequency contact that someone who visited your website but left without taking action. Each type of workflow can have a different number of emails in the series or “drip” out more frequently than others. The type of content can differ as well with newsletter recipients more apt to enjoy long-form content. Users who clicked only to qualify for a promotional offer may not want or care for educational content or longer emails.
Segmentation is not meant to overcomplicate your marketing efforts. Rather, streamlining your contacts list by their preferences can increase your chances of engagement. Also, the actions your contacts take can route them into a secondary email campaign to keep them engaged. Email marketing is only as complicated as you make it be and many of the best practices can become clear if you take the time to sit back and analyze throughout a campaign. If you have one contacts list and one email marketing campaign and that is working well for you—fantastic! Your users understand your content and are eager to learn more about the information you share. If more users unsubscribe or don’t click the longer you keep them in a campaign, you can hypothesize that your campaign may be too long.
Don’t be afraid to try something new!
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- Try out A/B testing subject lines of your messaging.
- Adjust the frequency of your emails and see how that affects your contacts’ behavior.
- Do shorter emails get more clicks than longer emails?
- How about text-based emails versus designed templates with multiple graphics and colors?
Along the way, you may lose a few contacts but the information you gain can be invaluable.
Find the Right Balance: How Many Emails Are Too Many?
Now to revisit the ultimate question—how many emails are too many? Review your current contacts list and email workflows to determine the natural taper on where leads are more likely to become unengaged or unsubscribed. Play around with the frequency of your emails, but unless your content requires you to be extremely timely, daily emails are likely too much. Consider weekly or other timing breakdowns to keep your contacts engaged without piling up in their inbox. The overall key to your number of emails is value. As long as your emails provide your contacts list with value, whether that be from educational content, promotions, or critical information, and maintain the pillars of your brand, the structure of your email campaigns will fall into place!
