Email Overkill? – Consider a Message Frequency Filter
Posted by Nic Winters on April 6th, 2009
In today’s world of digital communication, most of us have experienced being bombarded by too many emails – sometimes too many just from one sender. In my last blog post on email marketing strategy, I described ways that you can safeguard your brand and email reputation through the utilization of user roles. Yet another way to protect this is by monitoring and controlling the number of email touches you make to each individual on your list.
At first glance it may seem unlikely that over-mailing could occur under your watch, however if you have been listening to all of the email marketing best practices out there you likely have begun to segment your lists to send more relevant content. As you split your list into segments you may have many email addresses that are on multiple lists, causing list overlap and the chance that you might be emailing the same address multiple different newsletters or promotions. In larger corporations, perhaps your corporate level shares a customer list with rep offices… both levels then emailing to those same addresses.
You may still think this would only be a minor complication if all of these stars align, however just think how you would feel if another email marketer sent to your own email address 5 times in 3 days. Just one bad “overkill” experience like this can be enough to push some individuals on your list to hit that unsubscribe button.
With a feature like SubscriberMail’s Message Frequency Filter you can remove this risk of over-mailing by setting message frequency rules. This tool gives you the ability to set a limit of sending a set number of emails to an individual email address over a selected number of days. Thus, if a campaign is scheduled to deploy to a list containing an email address that has already hit its limit for a set time period then that individual address will be removed from the mailing. After filters are applied you can then monitor the results over time with reporting tools to see how often you are hitting these limits (letting you know if you possibly should tighten or loosen the filtering criteria).
Has your company had any issues with over-mailing? – leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!
