Everything you need to know about the risks of making customers angry by sending too many emails.
A previous article of mine sparked a healthy debate in the comments section (and my inbox!) about the appropriate amount of times a company can email its customers before those customers get annoyed. In the article, I discuss an entrepreneur building a soap company who was struggling to get repeat buyers because she wasn’t re-engaging her customers. I encouraged the entrepreneur to be emailing her customers every week. The responses ranged from a minority of people who agreed that constant re-engagement was key:
… to a majority of people who were appalled I’d dare suggest an entrepreneur email customers every week:
Interestingly, most of the people who argued against emailing once a week were particularly upset that a soap company might dare email its customers once per week. Apparently, soap isn’t important enough to merit weekly emails, but I guess that means other companies should be allowed.
Is that true? Can some companies email more often than others? If so, what are the appropriate limits? And how are you, as an entrepreneur supposed to know whether your company is allowed to email daily, weekly, monthly, or maybe even never?
The answer, of course, is that anyone who tells you the “right” amount of times to email customers isn’t giving you good advice (myself included). Email marketing strategy is much more nuanced than “X type of company is allowed to email Y amount of times,” and a good entrepreneur needs to understand this nuance. In reality, there are ways of running an email campaign that would allow any type of company to successfully email its customers every day (or more!), and there are ways to run email campaigns that would make emails from any company feel like SPAM even…