Hey, Big Sender

The surprising case for bombarding your customers with emails.

- Lissa Harris

Don’t annoy your customers.

If there’s a cardinal rule of email marketing, that’s it. Thus, most marketers describe the ideal email strategy as a careful balancing act between frequency and engagement. Sure, you need to send enough emails to stay on the customer’s radar. But send too many and your subscribers will flee, your click and open rates will plummet, and you will find yourself branded a common spammer.

For a time, Dela Quist shared this fear. Quist, CEO of British and U.S. email marketing firm Alchemy Worx, “started out where everyone else did, worrying about open rates and trying to get them as high as possible,” he says. Then he began digging into the numbers, looking at client campaigns for evidence that a business could get better results by sending less email. “What we found was, no matter what we did, more email generated more revenue. You could not stop that happening,” he says. So, data in hand, Quist began preaching a different gospel: Nothing is likely to make you more money than sending another email.

In essence, Don’t worry about annoying your customers. The data says they don’t hate email.

Quist’s “more is more” attitude makes email marketers nervous, but he gets results. Alchemy Worx’s client list includes names like Tesco, Expedia, and Hilton. One client, the U.K. insurer Aviva, saw the number of insurance quotes requested grow 48 percent after rolling out a strategy to email customers more often.