As a full service interactive agency, we work with many companies to help them understand the best way to run their email marketing campaigns. One of the mysteries of email marketing is when and how often email campaigns are sent. Over the last several years I’ve read countless analyst reports that attempt to pinpoint the right time, day and frequency an email campaign should be sent depending on the industry (i.e. retail, travel, b2b, etc.). When asked by clients and colleagues when and how often a campaign needs to run, I’m often reluctant to quote these statistics as they try to replicate them for their own campaigns. The fact of the matter is that frequency and timing of an email campaign should really depend on when you have content that is most relevant to the recipient. Now I’ll admit that’s easier said than done, but it is possible for any organization that’s willing to take this approach.

The simplest approach is to tell a client their industry typically sends an offer campaign 4 times a month, and that reports/statistics show that recipients have a high open and click-through rate on Thursday between 10am and 11am. I would have certainly provided sound strategy to my client and we’d end up sending an email once a week on Thursday between 10am and 11am. Granted we’d probably get average and perhaps above average results but so would everyone else.

I’d argue that we all know relevant content sent to a recipient when they want it will achieve the best possible results. For example, getting a lunch coupon for Chick-fil-A at 11am because I clicked or hovered over a banner ad in yahoo mail or hotmail will result in a higher conversion rate of that coupon than sending a blast campaign to everyone in my mailing list once every month. Yet the vast majority of campaigns are sent on a pre-defined frequency and time, typically to an un-segmented list (i.e. the message isn’t relevant to every recipient), and the content/offer is normally pretty generic. These campaigns still achieve good results but the approach can trap organizations into a routine as you scramble to get content based on a fixed schedule and start comprising on creative, content versions, segmenting, and testing in order to keep costs down mostly due to low ROI (cost of production and broadcast fees vs. revenue generated).

We should expect more from the web! So I’d rather tell a client they should send a campaign only when they have unique and valuable content that is relevant to a unique recipient. Stop sending “blast” campaigns to the whole mailing list and don’t create filler content because of a set frequency that recipients find generic. Introducing the concept of life cycle campaigns, trigger-based campaigns, personalized and dynamic segmented content campaigns regardless if the client is ready technically or logically can be a tough sell to any marketing department. Those who understand it embrace it, and those who don’t typically get caught up in the cost of running these types of campaigns, the sophistication in the logic and technology needed, and the change/risk of doing something so different. What we all need to realize is that the power of the tools we have, real-time data, and analytics that are at our fingertips has made this level of campaign available to any organization and can achieve far higher ROI than the typical blast frequency strategy.