Identifying loopholes and finding the best-fit email cadence for your audience, based on their content consumption behavior can give you better email marketing ROI. Besides ensuring that the content, the content flow and type of content, the overall design and engagement fits well, marketers have to focus on the most appropriate email send times and email frequency when nurturing leads or subscribers.
Email still works as a key marketing and business communication channel for marketers and brands who want to convert or nurture buyers at scale. Most marketing and sales people use emails to communicate with prospects and move them through the buying journey.
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Some of the most high performing marketing teams focus on structuring an entire email flow that includes planning the chain of communication and what type of content would be shared with each email send. But they don’t stop there. They spend time analyzing the most suitable email cadence, in terms of how regularly emails will be or should be delivered to a list of leads or subscribers, what time the emails should be sent and much more. This is what can set the right tone and interest with the audience.
What does it take to plan your email cadence?
Knowing what your goals are
Like everything in marketing and martech, there can never be a one-size-fits-all approach. For every different goal, a more customized email cadence has to be thought through. If you’re planning an email campaign for the next few weeks for a list of prospects; the typ e of content, the suggested send time, the frequency would be influenced by a different set of factors. If you’re running a newsletter campaign for instance, for a growing list of subscribers, a different set of influencers will come into play to determine the right rhythm, format, time and frequency of your newsletter campaigns. If the objective of every newsletter involves diverting readers back to your blog, different attributes have to be thought out.
Personalizing email sends as per customer’s reading / past email open behavior
With martech allowing marketers to track their readers and customers level of buying interest and content consumption patterns (the type of content they spend time on, for instance), it is not difficult to breakdown the open rates (times) of specific audiences, to identify what really works best for whom. Personalizing not just the email content but also send times based on your readers and subscribers actual interest and preferred time of day can increase engagement and allow prospects or customers to spend time engaging with your content.
The aim of every email campaign is to move buyers and prospects through a buying journey and get them interested in your product or service. While it’s easy to plan for a typical buying journey and create a structure that allows for must-haves; product introduction, product information as key features, case studies, helpful value-adds, etc; buyers will move through your email campaign at their own pace. What that means is, a buyer who has read your product features might not be ready to see a case study yet but if your email structure and flow already plans for it, that’s what they’ll get next. Marketers who spend time analyzing what content email content and website content is resonating with which audience on a regular basis, further personalization based on a buyer’s readiness or actual buying stage, the best email send time based on the kind of content (if it’s a value-add article, a more leisurely time), can deepen content engagement and move the reader / prospect to the next stage a lot quicker.
How often do your readers and send lists want to hear from you?
Based on the kind of campaigns you already run, you already have a fair idea into the most common reader behaviors your prospects show. Based on email opens, website visits, time spent on articles, it’s easy to understand your audience’s interaction with your content. But amid all of this, have you understood how often they actually want to hear from you via email?
Marketers who are growing a newsletter subscriber base and run daily newsletter campaigns can always give the option of having their readers choose the frequency (weekly vs daily newsletters). They can design different types of newsletters based on this interest, using the weekly version to share more comprehensive content and the daily one as a more detailed option.
For marketers who are running email campaigns for specific purposes, readers can be given the choice to update their preferences within the email itself in case they want to reduce email frequency.
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End note: Email trends will keep changing, so will your email cadence
Current business conditions, daily work and life patterns, changing reading behaviors, evolving content consumption habits will always give marketers reason to renew the kind of ‘’best practices’’ email marketers they need to follow to gain maximum ROI from email campaigns. Every business stage, every buying stage, every buyer and every email send has to follow different customizations and approaches based on this.
A well planned email cadence should keep prospects, readers, customers (as the case may be) interested. Paying attention to a few simple factors can improve email marketing performance significantly and this is where planning the best cadence can lead to results.
