- The Average Group: 29,000 contacts received 5 emails over the last 5 months
- The Oh Oh! Group: ~ 1,000 have received more than 6 emails
- The Lonely Group: 37,000 contacts received 1 email
The Average Group
At first glance, you may feel that 5 emails is way too much to send in 3 months (you also may not feel that way). But really it gets down to analyzing your response rates? Are they decreasing? increasing? The average Eloqua customer sends 4-6 emails per quarter last time I checked, and really you need to further segment your list to make a call on whether it is too much or too little. But as long as this isn’t 1 or isn’t 15, you are probably good as long as your response rates are not declining.
The Oh Oh! Group
This is the group that people worry about the most. But in reality it often is a very small part of your list. Also, when you look into individual email history, most of the time they are either company employees or partners. What I advise customers to do, is to take one contact and examine the emails that were sent to them, and ask themselves – should they have gotten those campaigns? Out of the 50 or so times I have done this with customers, the answer usually is – yes, they should have gotten all of those communications, some were support, some were reminders for an event, etc.
The Lonely Group
You pay way too much for new leads, why only communicate to leads you already have in your database < 1 time per quarter? This is the group you need to pay special attention to, and here are some steps to take.
- What is the lead score of this group? and if you are not lead scoring yet, just open a report of them in excel and scan them to see if there are some quality names in that list
- How new are those leads? If they are new – you really need to investigate implementing a “Welcome Program“, which is a lead nurturing program targeted at new leads to your database. If they are not new – are you seeing any response activity that would warrant an increase in communication frequency?
So there you have it – email frequency is not a simple issue to work through, but if you take the right steps, you can debunk the myth that there is a magic number per month to send, and maximize the potential for generating quality leads, from the database you already have.
