Email marketers frequently search for the “sweet spots” in their email campaigns: the moments within an email cycle when subscribers are most likely to take an action we want them to do, like making a purchase or registering for an event.
Testing can help us find the answers to queries such as these:
- Which source of acquisition brings in more eligible subscribers?
- In an onboarding sequence, how many emails should we send in order to encourage new subscribers to convert?
- Which combination of content, graphics, and subject lines will convert the highest?
Even though this information is useful, it only presents one aspect of the email problem. Knowing when your emails are most likely to cause readers to unsubscribe, file a complaint about spam, or ghost you is also important. It is also helpful to test here with inquiries such as these:
- In what amount of time can we send out email messages each week before we begin to annoy subscribers?
- Before Gmail cuts our emails, how much text can we include in them?
- We employ double opt-in; how many new subscribers do we lose as a result?
- In an automatic series like onboarding or abandonment, how many emails is too many?
Since we don’t want to irritate our subscribers to the point where they unsubscribe, mark our emails as spam, or stop communicating with us, these can be frightening subjects. Thus, we make no effort to learn. However, if we don’t know the answers, we risk burning through our list recklessly or leaving money on the table out of fear.
To put it plainly, it tastes better to look for the sweet spots in our email programs than to be aware of the tipping points. However, in order to balance bravery and caution in our email programs, we need to be aware of both.
Tipping point versus sweet spot
According to my usage, the sweet spot is the moment when our subscribers’ and customers’ responses to our emails prompt them to perform the desired activities. Testing enables us to locate those sweet spots, which is why correctly setting up and conducting tests is crucial.
Everyone enjoys talking about the sweet spots, such as the long-tail testing that provides the most realistic image of an email campaign’s performance or the multivariate test that identified the most successful Mother’s Day messaging strategy. I won’t go into depth about them here because I’ve written a lot about them already.
However, we don’t typically discuss the flip side of the coin, which is email’s tipping points. The tipping point, as I use it here, is reached when our email strategies start to backfire. We encourage negative behaviors in our subscribers and consumers instead of positive ones, such as unsubscribing, complaining about spam, blocking, or ghosting.
Still, these are circumstances that we ought to discuss. Understanding your tipping points will improve your comprehension of consumer behavior and help you determine when to draw the line to prevent upsetting clients and facing unfavorable outcomes.
Which points are crucial for you?
Even the mere mention of list churn, revenue loss, and deliverability problems can make an experienced email marketer’s hair stand on end, and rightfully so!
The only issue is that, frequently, we are unsure of whether increasing the volume of emails we send, giving them more weight, or redesigning our message layouts will result in tipping points or sweet spots.
Probably the most frequent tipping point is frequency. But rather than putting our old anxieties that have previously held us back to rest, we hesitate, not knowing how far we can go before we start to irritate our clients.
We may be aware that sending two emails in a series of abandoned carts frequently yields positive outcomes. How about sending three then? We won’t know if three emails is the real tipping point or the sweet spot if we don’t test to see if our fear that they will drive away clients is unfounded.
Emails used for onboarding are comparable. It’s not uncommon for brands to send out a series of three to five emails, but I’ve seen brands send out ten or fifteen. Is that appropriate for your audience—too few, too numerous, or just right? Everything is merely a guessing game if you don’t test.
Finding your tipping points through testing
Testing can reveal which emails receive more attention, where clients stop responding, and which ones either don’t make a difference or result in unfavorable interactions. But typically, we run the test to find a pleasant number and stop it when we believe we have found the winner.
However, testing can also reveal to you when you’ve gone too far, whether it’s through negative or nonexistent responses. Once more, most marketers are uneasy about this. Thus, rather of pushing the envelope a little to determine the ideal number, we retreat, gaining no more knowledge than we had prior to the experiment.
It’s important to keep in mind that there are never two opinions when it comes to tipping moments. Similar to sweet spots, these will change depending on a number of characteristics that set your list apart from everyone else’s, such as brand, audience, product, scenario (promotional versus transactional, for example), length of time on the list, and many more.
Testing can reveal the sweet spot, or frequency, cadence, and series length that best suits your requirements, as well as the point at which negative effects start to occur. Everything is a balancing act.
Return on investment and tipping points
Until now, I have defined tipping moments as the moment at which an email can lead a subscriber to take unfavorable actions such as unsubscribing, reporting spam, or ghosting. These can impact your sender reputation, deliverability, and inbox access, as well as your revenue if they originate from paying clients.
Another tipping point to take into account is when you no longer make enough money from those lengthy emails to justify sending them. This can be due to a lack of activity on your part or to the possibility that unfavorable subscriber actions would exceed any sales or conversions the emails generate. It’s not necessary to observe an increase in spam complaints or opt-outs. Why take a chance on potentially damaging your email program if the return isn’t there?
This reminds me of the balance I mentioned earlier. Making more educated choices about email frequency, tempo, and quantity is possible when you are aware of your tipping point. You won’t have to make assumptions or guess at what your consumers and subscribers are up to.
Three places to look for critical moments
The primary reason given by customers for unsubscribing or ceasing to be active on an email list is “too much email.” However, determining the ideal email frequency and the point at which negative behavior tips off are far more involved than just selecting whether to send one or two email campaigns each week.
Lastly, exercise caution and critical thinking rather than recklessness.
It may appear that I’m approving email marketers to drive users to the verge of unsubscribe in order to discover their breaking points. It is impossible for anything to be more false!
We need to use critical thinking that takes into account our understanding of our consumers and their journey, rather than presuming we know what will irritate our subscribers to the point where they will take offense.
We receive signals from our subscribers and consumers all the time. All we need to do is pay attention to what they actually say, not just what we want to hear.
#EmailMarketing #MarketingStrategy #EmailCampaigns #DigitalMarketing #MarketingTips #EmailOptimization #CustomerEngagement #MarketingInsights #EmailSuccess #EmailStrategy