I was thinking the other day as I was on the hunt for a new laptop about how long an email campaigns life cycle would be and how it differs between industries.

So let’s take the laptop as an example.  I’m going to want a laptop once every three or four years, depending on the quality.  I would assume that the majority of people would have a similar habit to me on this.

During this time, I want to receive as much information and offers about laptops as I can possibly get so that I can make a well informed decision for the best price I can find.

I would be happy to see a more frequent email campaign coming from any of the laptop companies that I have signed up for; and any computer specialist retailers should really be sending a higher frequency of emails.

You see, as soon as I buy my laptop, I’m not going to be slightly interested in what they have to say anymore, and will unsubscribe from them.  They really only have a very short time frame in which to grab a large majority of their recipients attention, and more importantly, convert them to sales.

At the other end of the spectrum though, are companies that really don’t need to send that many emails at all.  I help a friend with his email campaigns for a valve company.  Now as I’m sure you can guess, the world of valve sales isn’t the fastest paced and intense of marketplaces and he only really does a bi-annual email with latest developments.

When you look at his customers and recipients, they still tend to have a quite high brand loyalty and therefore will not need reminding of his companies presence but can just try to maybe persuade potential customers with new developments.

Again a general rule is to keep the emails more regular than that to ensure that the potential customers’ interest is sustained, but I think that anything more than a bi-annual campaign would be more damaging to a customer’s interest and may cause the subscriber to switch off from the newsletter as the messages get watered down with irrelevant content.

So I think that the frequency of your campaigns isn’t as important as how well received it will be.  Make sure that the campaign you send out isn’t just for the sake of sending an email out but is full of relevant, intriguing information that will maintain your recipient’s interest.

If that means that you must decrease or increase your email activity, don’t be scared off by rules telling you otherwise.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under sending habits, email marketing campaign, email content, email design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.