Christmas Tree’s Water Consumption; a Lesson on Email Frequency
I have worked with a lot of different clients. Lots of table top games businesses, but also some in agriculture, tech, law, and healthcare.
But across the board, nearly all of my clients share the same fear:
“What if I message my email list so much that I become annoying and unsubscribe?”
It is a super normal fear and one I completely understand. After all, every one of us has unsubscribed after receiving multiple obnoxious “last minute” Black Friday emails every day from the same company for two weeks straight…
Emailing too much irritates your subscribers.
It breaks trust and turns them off to the brand. And worst of all, they almost never go back.
However, when I put up my Christmas tree in late November… and watched it stay fresh and green for well over a month… I knew I had the perfect illustration to help relieve your fears…
My cousin is a chef, and once the summer season ended (at the lovely club in Coeur d’Alene) she and her husband had the time to meet us for dinner in Spokane.
At some point in the conversation, they told us about an amazing local Christmas tree farm that cuts their trees down within 48 hrs of getting the trees to the lot. And if you get the trees in the first weekend, you can have a fresh, green Christmas tree by New Years.
That was enough of a sales pitch for us. The past few years in San Diego we had gotten ours at the Home Depot across the street, and that tree got about as crisp as a Doritos in just three weeks.
So week and a half later, first thing that Saturday morning, we hopped in our Subaru (yes I’m basic don’t judge me), grabbed a coffee, and drive over to the CdA fairgrounds to be there within an hour of opening on the first day.
The actual “tree picking” part was uneventful, but for a really good reason: THE TREES WERE G-O-R-G-E-O-U-S… impossible for someone to get it wrong. In about 5 minutes we found one that was the perfect height, width, species, density… absolutely stunning.
But as we were cutting it down, they told us something that surprised me:
“These trees drink a lot of water; you’ll have to water it morning, noon, and night”
I couldn’t believe it.
I have NEVER had to water my Christmas tree nearly that much.
In fact, most of the time I would go to water it, it would still be full!
I reasoned: “They must be over-exaggerating. Surely every other day is good enough”
Well, we got the tree home…
Set it up in the stand…
Watered it…
Waited two days and…
ZERO WATER WAS LEFT.
You see, the reason you want to keep it watered all the time is because once the runs out of water, in a few hours the base of the tree will “seal up”.
Seal up = A) it stops drinking water and B) starts dying.
So around 930pm at night, when we would rather be watching “Shrinking” or “Masters of the Air” on Apple TV, my wife and I went through the labor of taking it out, sawing off another 1/2 inch, setting it all back up again, and filling it back up with water.
And the next morning?
70% of the water was gone.
We had overcome our mistake, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. And as a result, as this blog post is published, our tree is still a lush, deep, dark green color.
So… what does this have to do with email marketing?
Well, it doesn’t matter if you are in healthcare or making board games…
I am 99% sure you are not emailing your subscribers enough.
The VAST majority of businesses are so afraid of the consequences of over emailing that they swing to the other extreme of the pendulum, opting to email every other week or every month.
And while there is a right email frequency for everyone (and SOMETIMES 2x a month works) the facts just do not support that kind of irregularity:
Once you set expectations early, your customers will accept more email communication from you (source)
If its great content, ever changing offers, or regular promotions, the you can send emails 2-3 times a week (source)
It takes more than 6.21 emails for engagement to start to drop (source)
Omnisend found that for small business marketing, the numbers of orders continued to rise with every email sent up to 19 per month.
Christmas trees : water :: customers : email frequency… in other words…
Customers can handle A LOT of content and communication from you.
Don’t beleive me? Check out these graphs:
Around 5 emails per week people start to complain about the email frequency… and at 7 emails per week the unsubscribes skyrocket.
So if you are emailing once per month, and your competition is emailing 4x per week… what does that mean?
It means they are engaging 1600% more than you.
And yes, that engagement WILL have financial results… the ROI for email is around $36:1… and that is a LOW estimate.
Finally, let me reassure you the same way a therapist reassures someone who fears they have a personality disorder.
Therapists say: “If you are worried you are a narcissist… then you are not a narcissist”
Well, in the same vein, let me tell you:
“If you are worried that you are emailing them too much… then you are not emailing them too much!”
The more strategized, personalized, segmented, email engagement you can afford… THE BETTER!!!
