Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format. With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

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Consumers show an appetite for email marketing

Despite technological advances in message delivery, email frequency optimization remains a highly contested topic among marketers and consumer advocates. Consequently, the company the email marketing-related behaviour of more than 600,000 end users over a three-month period to identify the optimal sending frequency based on subscriber engagement.

The findings suggest that each sender's "magic number" - the frequency that generates maximum response without excessive complaints - not only differs among brands but also differs dramatically based on account type, concluding that marketers can indeed send emails more frequently than they already do, but not necessarily to their customers' primary email accounts.

More tolerant than thought
While it is still true that complaints increase and read rates decline with increased frequency, the threshold at which more complaints offset the benefit of more reads is quite high. Return Path focused on the subset of consumers receiving email from at least five commercial senders to discover the relationship between increased frequency and its resulting effect on complaints and read rates.

Among highly active email users, most tolerate up to an average of five messages per week before complaints offset increases in messages read. When users complain by indicating that a commercial message is spam, mailbox providers stop delivering the sender's email to the inbox, effectively ending their email relationship.

The study highlighted an obvious missed opportunity for many brands, concluding that most email marketers simply need to employ more frequency testing to uncover their capacity to send and sell more.

Why not the Primary Account?
One key to optimizing for frequency is segmenting by account type. Return Path identified three distinct groups based on users' overall interaction with email: primary, secondary, and dead accounts.

Primary accounts, the most actively checked, make up only 24% of all email accounts yet they represent 83% of all messages read. While primary users are highly engaged, they are also not shy in voicing their displeasure, accounting for half of total email complaints. As they represent the majority of reads as well as complaints, primary users are the key audience marketers should optimize their programmes for - albeit cautiously. These users are the best critics to market to as they won't hesitate to praise (read, click through) or criticize (complain, unsubscribe) any shifts in frequency.

More tolerant were secondary account holders who interact with their mailboxes less often and represent fewer reads, but are less than half as likely as primary account holders to complain. These subscribers may represent a frequency test audience that marketers can approach less cautiously.

The complete study has been made available from the Return Path website - click here (free registration required).

Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format.

With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

You'll learn to sell yourself, sell your products, and sell your brand on the internet, writing high-conversion landing pages, social media posts, and more. You'll start attracting customers you didn’t even know existed, and learn the top trade secrets for customer retention.

You'll become a lean, mean selling machine. See how the experts do it and learn to adapt what they've done for your own profit. You'll learn to write strong, powerful, effective sales copy, whether it's for a sales script, sales letter, flyer, insert, advert or just about anything else.

You'll learn how to sell whether you're selling by telephone, by mail, or even meeting prospects face-to-face. You'll find out how to size them up, present yourself, nail down their true needs, close the sale, and learn to tackle the tricky ones.

You'll discover the biggest secrets of successful direct mail sellers, sales letter writers, and how to segment and choose the right prospects for each campaign.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)