The when it comes to e-mail marketing strategies we have this constant vision that “the money is in the list”. This mindset is true to a certain extent as staying in constant contact with your existing customers is a great way to maintain and cultivate future sales.

However, successful e-mail marketing strategy depends on balance in many areas. Balance in trying to sell something in your e-mails and balance in the amount of e-mails you send over a period of time.

So How Can We Solve This Problem?

Well, let’s start with how many e-mails you send out. If you are building a list from your websites using any mainstream autoresponder, you will have access to the statistics for sign-ups and unsubscribers. Keeping a watchful eye on your growth and ratio of unsubscribes you get is essential. The aim of any email marketing efforts is to stay present in your customers minds without overloading them with an e-mail every single day and annoying them.

There are no hard and fast rules for how many e-mails you can send in a week as it largely depends on your target market and how you’ve built your list up to this point. For examples, if you send an e-mail out every two days, each e-mail trying to sell or promote something, you are likely to have a lot of unsubscribers. Obviously, this is detrimental to your future success. In this case it may not be the volume of e-mails for sending out but the fact that you’re trying to sell in every single e-mail.

Not only that, writing an e-mail every two days is a time-consuming affair. As a general rule of thumb I like to give value to my customers and only send out the occasional promotional e-mail. I also tend to send out an e-mail only ones or twice a week. For me, this has allowed me to build a level of trust and respect with my customers and reader, which I very much appreciate by the way!

When I do send out a promotion, I let my customers know that this is a promotion and I tell them why I am recommending a product or service to them and why I think it will benefit my readers. This also helps maintain a high level of trust and response from my mailing list. Another aspect we need to talk about for successful email marketing strategies is consistency. Consistency in mailing is very important, if you are sporadic with your mailing you are not building up a rapport or a level of trust with your email list. Even if your e-mails are great and provide incredible value, being sporadic may generate poor results.

So How Much Is Too Much?

Well if you are sending out value e-mails and promotional e-mails at what you feel is a good ratio, check your unsubscribe rate. If you are losing more than 1% of your list in a week then you’re sending out too many emails. If this is the case, add two days to your mailing cycle or increase the ratio of value e-mails to promotional e-mails. You are going to get unsubscribers no matter what you do but making sure you minimize this is essential to your future success and growth as a business. One of the best things you can do to really maximize your e-mail marketing strategies is giving your customers value and a reason to come back to your website time and again. By doing this you are much more likely to have a higher response to your promotional or sales e-mails and increase your traffic to your website.