Sophisticated segmentation helps ensure you don’t spam your contacts
While working with a B2C client in the telecommunications industry a few years ago, administering their “recency” policy was done in the world of excel. Given the implications of spamming in Australia relative to the Spam Act, it was a balancing act to make sure they met their obligations.
Many companies have their own recency policy which is above and beyond what’s required by law. It really forms part of brand management, you don’t want your brand to appear as something that’s annoying and fills people’s email in-boxes with garbage.
But what does the research say?
The team at Eloqua is constantly looking at the results of email campaigns of their thousands of clients. Egan Cheung from Eloqua wanted to know “how much is too much?”. So he looked at 6,300,000,000 emails sent by Eloqua customers to see if he could uncover some trends. 6.3 billion emails provided some insight.
Sophisticated segmentation helps ensure you don’t spam your contacts
While working with a B2C client in the telecommunications industry a few years ago, administering their “recency” policy was done in the world of excel. Given the implications of spamming in Australia relative to the Spam Act, it was a balancing act to make sure they met their obligations.
Many companies have their own recency policy which is above and beyond what’s required by law. It really forms part of brand management, you don’t want your brand to appear as something that’s annoying and fills people’s email in boxes with garbage.
Your first reaction when looking at this graph could be that you need to send fewer emails. Cheung commented:
I found that you can certainly expect to see higher click-through rates when you only contact a small part of your database relatively infrequently – but guess what else you can expect? Lower volume of responses. Sure – over emailing your lists can certainly cause fatigue, but don’t let yourself be governed by hard and fast rules here.
This stands to reason when you think about it, but sometimes we tend to get hung up on optimizing for local, not global maxima. Put another way: don’t lose sight of the goal; a high click-through rate is desirable only if it brings you more leads.
Are rules made to be broken? Not when legislation governs them?
We have to keep the legal team happy while balancing their happiness with the need for better marketing-qualified leads. The creation of segments within Eloqua helps you easily create lists of contacts who have e.g. “received an email within the past 30 days” or “received X number of emails within the past X number of days”. Your segment can be built to conform to your specific recency policy.
On the flip side, you can filter your contacts to understand who you haven’t contacted within the past X number of days or months. Regardless of how you manage your recency policy, Eloqua can help you execute campaigns with the confidence you need to keep Legal happy but manage your engage strategy at the same time.
