Frequency
Email marketing best practice
Knowing how many emails to send is vital. Too many emails and your unsubscribe rates will spike and your open rates will drop. Too few and you might have the same problem - as people will have forgotten they were on your list and why they signed up.
Both are bad! You’re aiming for a goldilocks zone, where people hear from you regularly, but not so often that they get annoyed.
It’s also worth remembering that most members, might get emails from the:
- Federal party
- State party
- Regional party
- Local party
- Local branch
And that’s before you include specialist email lists and party bodies such as ALDC, SAOs, AOs and others.
That adds up fast - and sending too many emails affects us all.
“Too many” of course depends on context. In the case of urgent, breaking news for example, people are happy to receive many more emails than at other times.
Former MP Tom Brake had some great experiences with sending multiple emails on the same day, to keep residents in the loop of which schools were open and closed during a patch of really bad weather. But these were exceptional circumstances.
Given all of this, the maximum frequency you should aim for is 1-2 emails per week, or 6-9 over a month, so that we don’t all trip over each other and end up annoying the people we all want to reach.
To help you manage this even better, people subscribed to our emails can set a “Frequency Preference”, asking us to email them as little as a month. This is a preference, so you don’t have to follow it, but it’s generally best practice to do so.
Frequency preference can be set here and is visible on both Lighthouse & Targeted Email. It’s a custom field in Connect, so can be included in filters.
We’ll cover a few tactics for reducing the emails you send later on - but here are a few questions to ask before sending:
- Does this need to be a standalone email? Or could I combine it with other topics?
- Does this email need to go to everyone? (Less than 1 in 10 member emails from the Federal Party goes to the full membership)
- Would I open and read this email?
If the answer to either of the first two is no, adjust your email and audience. If the answer to the third is no, don’t send it.