The Balancing Act of Direct Email Contact Frequency

As a recipient of several companies’ direct email marketing campaigns, I find that some contact me too frequently, which annoys me, while others wait too long to deliver information, thus I forget about them. Is this typical customer behavior and, if so, how can this knowledge be used to make email marketing more efficient? A recent study by Dreze and Bonfrer in the Journal of Marketing (April 21, 2008) investigates this question with empirically derived data. By tracking the results of a permission based email marketing campaign, the authors were able to measure the effect of contact frequency on email opens, email link click-throughs and customer retention.

Some Important Sharing Statistics

If garnering word-of-mouth recommendations for your content, product, or service, wouldn’t it be helpful to know when people are most likely to share? Here’s the data we have gathered so far across all forms of recommendations (email, digg, delicious, facebook, etc).

Shares Per Hour (Mountain Standard Time - US)

Better Sales Through a Customer Email Lead List

If time has taught salespeople anything, it’s that communicating directly with your customer is the most effective and efficient way to generate a sale. Granted, casting a wide net with particular marketing strategies, such as a TV ad, can be a good way to get the word out, but when it comes to closing the deal, nothing beats focused communication appropriate for the customer at hand.

While not as powerful as a face-to-face conversation, email is a great way to leverage this direct contact marketing tactic. Because there are no geographical barriers online, thousands of addresses from all over the world can be gathered and, over time, each one can be contacted with a sales offering. In addition, because the recipient must volunteer this information, you know they’re interested in your ideas. As a result, email addresses are excellent customer leads.

So how does one go about generating a customer email lead list? Here’s a few ideas you might want to consider.

Email Based Referrals - They Still Matter

News that email is dead always surprises me. Search for the phrase “Email is Dead” and you are bound to find myriad articles with the same message; social media is in, email is out, and if you want to market your company’s products and services, shift marketing dollars out of email based initiatives and into Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other Web 2.0 tools. While I won’t be foolish enough to vehemently deny the fundamental transformation of the web from a static medium to a participatory one, the data about email-based referrals we’ve collected across referralZen subscribers is simply overwhelming. Here’s a graph of sharing statistics across our network.

Word of Mouth: The Positive Ripple

A recent article by Rick Ferguson highlights the rising trend among businesses to leverage word of mouth marketing campaigns to grow their business. As an example, Ferguson notes that 82% of the fastest growing private companies use word of mouth techniques. By tapping into the innate human desire to appear in-the-know, word of mouth marketing methods leverage communication and recommendations between customers to grow awareness of the business.

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