Send your emails too often and your customers could get annoyed; send them too rarely and you could be forgotten. What is a busy owner to do?!
The typical baseline that most email marketers go for is about once a month, or 12 per year, for non-personal communications. What we mean by this is that personal communication does not count, such as email confirmations or appointment rebooking reminders. Taking these sorts of communications out of the mix, you should aim to stay at around 12 per year.
But what about all of these big retailers sending them every week? Why can they send more and get away with it? Well, the truth is that an accurate measurement of your ideal email frequency is a mixture of things and those things will change for every salon as no salon has the same exact mixture of clients, circumstances or marketing messages. If you want to know how far you can push the frequency envelope you will have to first examine a few things in your email program.
Agreements
When your clients signed up for emails from you, what did you say were the topics and contents of those emails? If you said they were mostly for confirmations, keep it that way. If you said if it was to receive updates on things in the salon and periodic promotions, keep it that way. Whatever you promised would be in those emails you need to be consistent with that promise. Make sure every email you send is both newsworthy an capable of capturing attention. Don’t send out an email just because you have to to stay on schedule. Send them when you have news to share to ensure that your clients actually read them and get something from the email every time.
Part of this agreement could have also been a number of emails, or frequency. Did you agree to only send them monthly? Or did you leave it open ended? Make sure you examine this element of the agreement and stick to it.
If you want to change any of your agreements and increase the frequency, make sure to communicate that. “We’re expanding our email program to include periodic hair and beauty news, would you like to be part of this?” Be respectful of what they want to receive and not receive.
Email Content
The next thing you should consider is even if you need to increase the frequency of your emails. You would have to have a lot of valuable things to say. And the operative word here is valuable. Make sure you review everything you’d like to blast out on email and ask yourself, “What does my client get out of this?” and perhaps even more importantly “When was the last time I sent this type of email?” Make sure that you aren’t sending too many promotional emails and that you are offering a good balance of information to your clients.
Also, make sure you are monitoring your email performance statistics and surveying your clients in order to really understand what your clients are responding to. Perhaps they like your hair tips more than your salon news, or vice versa. The trick is to provide them with the information they want and ensure it is also commercially beneficial to you – a real balance between the two.
Opt-Out Rates
As you start your increased email program, pay extra attention to opt out rates. If they spike upwards, you know that people don’t appreciate the extra emails in their inbox and don’t find enough value in the messages to want them. To find out exactly what their opinions are, insert a survey in the opt-out form and ask them what it was that made them opt-out. Depending on your email marketing program you can also ask if they’d like to simply reduce their frequency. This gets into some complex setup, so if you’d like to learn more speak to your linkup coach.
Author Bio: Valorie Reavis
Social Marketer, foodie, closet geekA marketing professional who has focused primarily on the hair and beauty business for of the past decade, Valorie now runs linkup marketing, a digital marketing agency for the hair and beauty professional. Valorie works to engage clients in the marketing process and help them successfully engage with their clients and community. Energetic and passionate about the industry, Valorie focuses on blending traditional and digital media in order to bring salons closer to their clients.
