What would you say if another marketer told you to email your list every single day?
If you’re anything like most bloggers or online business owners out there, you would think that they are insane! In your mind, you’d probably imagine the subscribers on your email list complaining endlessly or simply heading for the exits and sending your email unsubscribes through the roof.
But say you somehow got over that fear and considered actually doing it. What would you say to your subscribers if you were to communicate with them that often?
Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not that insane to consider talking to your subscribers on a daily basis.
If you’ve been following our blog here for a while, then you know that I’m a big advocate of creating epic posts for your blog (I’m talking about massive 2,000 – 4,000+ word monsters packed full of value, not those 300 or 500-word articles that you can put together in a few minutes…)
For those smaller everyday things that you want to share with your audience, you can do so by email.
This concept may be a little hard to grasp at first, especially if you’ve been convinced that emailing your list with such regularity will make them reach for the unsubscribe button at once.
There are a lot of successful online marketers who email their lists once every day. In some cases, they do it every weekday, but still, it flies in the face of all that we’ve been told about how people hate to receive daily emails.
The truth is, depending on your niche, emailing your subscribers every day could actually work out better for you.
For example, someone in the women’s fashion niche might run a successful Youtube channel and send videos to their audience on a daily basis.
Between the videos and their social media they wouldn’t need to be very active on their site, but instead, they would communicate through their email and still manage to keep their audience totally engaged and grow their business consistently.
An example of an online marketer who is making this work very effectively is Justin Brooke who has a daily email – The Daily Edge which talks about traffic.
Jason Van Orden is someone else who also does daily emails very well.
While this practice isn’t widespread right now (mostly because a lot of online marketers are just plain scared to try it) a lot of the people who are doing it are actually experiencing some pretty spectacular results in their businesses or blogs.
What would happen if you gave it a try and emailed your subscribers every day?
Is there such a thing as ‘Optimal’ Email Frequency?
Most bloggers wonder about the frequency with which they should be emailing their lists. Personally, I believe that the minimum should be at least once every week because you don’t want to let your list go stale.
When people don’t hear from you often enough, they start to drift away and lose interest.
No one wants to receive promotions all the time, and if your emails are just one pitch-fest after another, then your audience is obviously going to mind receiving them every day, but if you are providing them with actual value that makes a difference in their lives then they will welcome the information on a daily basis.
There are some scary studies that show the top reason for unsubscribes is that emails are too frequent, but other studies also show that most of those people who unsubscribe would rather choose to have less frequent emails than to unsubscribe completely, given the option.
Study after study shows the same conclusions which are as follows:
- Email subscribers lose interest and engage less and less the more frequently you email them
- Your subscribers are more likely to lose interest and unsubscribe if you’re emailing them too often
- The people on your list don’t like to be emailed too frequently
But…
That type of data doesn’t always paint a true picture, as evidenced by the growing numbers of online marketers who are finding huge success and growing their businesses by emailing their lists every day.
The issue with these types of studies is that they look at email frequency inside a bubble. They don’t consider WHAT is in the emails the subscribers are receiving.
What types of content do individuals pay attention to every single day?
- News programs?
- TV shows?
- Radio shows?
- Podcasts?
There are tons of examples, so clearly, it’s not that they don’t want you to communicate with them on a daily basis, it’s that they want your communications to be useful and entertaining.
If you are routinely sending boring stuff to them, then you’re not going to get them to engage with your content, but if you make your emails interesting and valuable, they will actually look forward to them and pay attention to them every single day.
The studies that are telling us that people don’t want to get emailed every day are focusing on ‘promotional emails and commercial emails’. Obviously, people are going to say that they don’t want those every day.
Can you imagine getting hammered with sales, pitches, deadlines, coupons, and yellow highlighters every single day? It’s enough to make you run screaming for the hills!
But, as a smart marketer, you know that if you were to email your list every day, your emails would have to be useful, enlightening, and entertaining.
Make them personal, like they are coming from a really good friend.
When you look at it this way, it presents a totally different picture than the one that is painted by those research surveys, don’t you think?
The bottom line is that your emails can never be too frequent (they can only be too boring), and when you do it right, the frequency of your emails can actually boost your sales and help you grow your business.
It’s been proven by those brave marketers who took the plunge that if you communicate with your customers and prospects more often, you will make more money in the long run.
But let’s look at it from a different perspective than money:
The Connection Between Your Email List and Your Blog
As an online marketer, you know full well that we are in the ‘attention’ business.
If you can get, and keep your audience’s attention, you will succeed. All the communication that you do starts with attention.
Without it, you could send all the communication that you want, but it just won’t land which means that you may as well be communicating with a brick wall.
The more attention you command, the more money you make.
This is true in every single industry, and it’s the reason why celebrities make so much money even though some don’t even do that much. It’s not really about the size of your list or the size of your following on social media.
It’s not about any of that. It’s all about attention.
Yes, the email list and the social media following both have lots of potential energy but it is not realized until those people start paying actual attention to you.
Why do you imagine Kim Kardashian makes so much money?
It’s certainly not for her talent and her contributions to the world. It’s because people are paying attention to her … assets.
Being able to command attention is what gets them those celebrity endorsements and quite frankly, it’s what got Trump elected. In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s great at commanding all the attention.
OK, enough about that.
Now, take a look at your own blog. It’s a reactive platform by nature and it’s just there waiting for people to come to it and read your posts. Google (hopefully) sends you readers, but by itself, your blog has no ability to command anyone’s attention – even if you put the world’s best content on it.
Social media can be very effective and it could allow you to reach out and command some attention, but it’s very noisy out there and there are a lot of distractions.
And then we have your list of email subscribers.
This is where the magic happens, but unfortunately, most bloggers don’t really use their lists in the best way possible. What do they do?
They just use it to email out their latest blog posts. While this is still better than nothing, there’s so much else you could be doing with your list.
Consider the following things which highlight the strengths of each platform:
- Email has the ability to reach out and get people’s attention – something that your blog cannot do
- Your blog is ideal for longer and more thorough content, while you can use your email for the smaller, everyday pieces of content
- You reach new people through your blog platform, whereas email allows you to communicate with existing people
- Email is much more personal than your blog and you can send frequent emails without devaluing everything you’re doing.
These are all great reasons to consider this as your content marketing strategy.
Treat your blog as a content marketing platform, and not a journal for all those small daily updates. Use pillar content on your blog and update your readers daily through your email list.
This means that you should post new stuff less often on your blog, but when you do post, make it count.
After that, you can go back and update those blog posts as time goes on to keep them current and share-worthy and to get prime search placement and much more.
Your email is where it’s more appropriate to communicate more frequently.
So treat your blog the way most people treat their email lists, and treat your email list the way they do their blogs by ‘blogging’ to your email subscribers and turning your blog into an extremely useful library of epic, awesome pillar posts.
The bottom line is, you should use your blog for building your audience, and your email list for building relationships with that audience. By adopting this approach, you will be making effective use of the unique strengths of each of these platforms.
The R-P-F Formula for Emails
People will be happy to do business with you if they know, trust, and like you. That’s marketing 101. But what makes your audience like and trust you?
In my opinion, it comes down to three things:
Relevancy
Making sure that the message is relevant to whoever is receiving it, determining if they are interested in it, if they actually care, and if the message is something that is applicable to them.
Personality
This basically means being personal in the way you communicate. Just be human. Be YOU. Don’t sound corporate. Talk to your audience as you would to a friend.
Frequency
This is about being ‘top of mind’ for your audience and that’s why you should make sure that you’re communicating often enough (even if you don’t do it every day).
Just remember that even if you are relevant and personal in your marketing, if you barely message your list then you won’t get effective results since they may not remember you.
So as you can see, the scene is starting to look vastly different to what those studies and surveys about email frequency reported.
But then again, it’s important to understand that frequency without relevancy or personality won’t help you either.
But, if you can find a perfect balance between relevancy and personality, then you will be able to ramp up the frequency and your audience will absolutely love you for that.
In Conclusion
I’m not trying to convince you that you have to switch to emailing your list daily. That is definitely not going to be the best option for everyone. But, you have to evaluate your own situation, your market and your time to see if that might work for you.
If you haven’t considered this before because of the information from the studies that we mentioned, now you know that their data is to be taken with a grain of salt and you can decide for yourself if you think your business or blog could benefit from communicating with your audience on a daily basis.
Feel free to post your comment below. An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!
PlanetBizOp.com
->Steven
Updated: Originally published July 8th 2018
Thanks very much for approaching email marking from a different angle. Emailing daily isn’t something I’ve ever thought of. Being honest, I’ve not even started using email just yet. I probably feel too daunted by it all.
What’s the best plug-in to use would you say? How much time per day do you dedicate to your email list?
If you plan to start and grow a sizeable email project, you should consider a list management service like aweber or MailChimp. There are a bunch to choose from out there, aside from these two, so look around and choose the one that fits your needs and budget.
If you are just looking to email users when you publish something new, a social media plugin is usually sufficient, it is all automatic and requires little attention. This is all I am doing at the moment, but if the need arises, I’ll move to a third party list management system that can handle a large volume.
Thanks for the comment Stephen!
This is a very interesting article and I currently do have an email subscription on my website but I don’t follow it very much. However, you make absolute sense it’s always best to engage with your clients just like you would any other social media site. How else would you be gaining some exposure? Thank you for creating an awareness of what hundreds of people like myself do is neglect their mailing list. I would be saving this for reference,
Happy to know you enjoyed the article.
Thanks for the comment Viviana!
Interesting post. I haven’t started with full email marketing campaigns and I really thought that everyday contact with subscribers is a bit too much.
After reading your post, I am inclined to change my mind but there is another question: How to produce new interesting material to offer to your readers? or as you say that emails might be boring but not too frequent if you have something useful to say.
All things considered, your RPF formula sounds very good and probably the best recipe.
Daily contact isn’t strictly necessary. The point is, it can be acceptable if you have something different and interesting to say that often. If not, a couple times a week is fine too, just keep your communication fresh and useful.
Thanks for the comment Alex!
Very interesting Article. I also naturally thought that emailing people every day would drive them away but i can see what you mean by sending them valuable packets of data in the email and saving the big stuff for the site.
I can see how email is important to maintaining relationships with long-term customers, which is very important. The RPF Formula is also helpful, thanks.
Glad you got some useful information from the post.
Thanks for the comment Renton!
Hi Steven,
I have always wanted to start an email list for my blog, but I am not sure I can keep up with contacting its members regularly.
Besides the tools, what do you suggest I should write to my list subscribers? What do you think should be in the emails to get their attention? And where do I start?
Thanks for a great post 🙂
Marios
It depends on how you monetize your site. Basically, you must provide value in your email campaigns, to keep your subscribers interested. Try to think about what you would want to receive if you were a subscriber.
Thanks for the comment Marios!
And offering from my own experience it is good at some point to email every day depending on how aggressively you need to pursue certain campaigns. Sometimes time restrictions were not allow you to so when you have things set on automatic responders that’s great! However some days are OK to back off
Agreed. Sending your list email daily certainly isn’t necessary in every case. Be sure you have something useful to send, when you do. However, if you do have useful information to send daily, don’t be afraid to do just that.
Thanks for the input Andrew!