A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

We are currently in the process of planning out our August - December 2007 email strategies for our clients. In trying to determine campaign frequency, there were two very interesting statistics we discovered when we looked at one client's email campaign over the course of the first six months of 07.

The email schedule is represented in the following graph (each email went out to the exact same database of names):

This chart shows us that it takes up to five emails to achieve a 50% duplication of clicks, indicating that you need to look at email as a frequency game – only about one in five emails from your company are opened by an actively engaged recipient at a given time.

The second statistic we found was that 68% of people click on an email within the first 24 hours of the email being deployed (the email was always deployed at 6pm). There are two noticeable peaks: within the first 4 hours, and then again 14 hours later (approximately 8 a.m.) as people are either starting their day by logging on, or logging on and viewing as they get to work.

The meaning here is simple: your emails have a very short "shelf life" so they need to be extremely compelling, relevant and timely to engage your audience.

Both of these analyses helped us to better understand that a higher level of frequency is needed to reach the intended recipient at the right time and with the right – as well as timely – message.