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You can Find your next new client on a mailing list of HR directors, marketing directors, IT managers, finance directors or chief executives.

How Many Is Too Many?: Using Email Lists Effectively And Sensibly

Wed, 10/06/2015

'How often can I use the mailing list?' can be the first question a new client asks Electric Marketing.

We don't restrict the use of our mailing lists: it's your marketing campaign, you are running the show. But to get the best value from an email list and to be able to use it over and over, we recommend that you limit emailing your cold prospects to once a month.

Business-to-business email marketers must be alive to their 'unsubscribe' rate. UK law states that you can send emails to business people on business matters but if they ask you not to contact them again or 'unsubscribe', you must not email that person again.  Each 'unsubscribe' is a prospect that you cannot email again. Ever.

To get best value from your email marketing list, keep the unsubscribes to a minimum so that your list of 1,000 marketing managers does not deteriorate to 900 email addresses after the first week.

One of the top reasons people give for requesting to be removed from the Electric Marketing database, is that they receive too many emails. If a prospect feels that your emails are filling up their inbox, they will seek out your unsubscribe button and launch themselves off your email list.

In tests, we have found that an email campaign to a fresh list of cold prospects can expect an unsubscribe rate of 0.5%.  Email that same list one month later and we receive the same unsubscribe rate. But email the same list two weeks later and the second email generated 1% of unsubscribe notices and we note, more strident language.  By emailing twice a month, so 24 times in one year, your email list shrinks at twice the rate.

'People don't unsubscribe because they do not want to hear from you, they unsubscribe because they know what you are offering.'

If your email marketing serves to remind businesses that you are still eager to do business with them, it is likely that you don't have anything different to offer from last week.  You wouldn't write to a business every week saying pretty much the same thing, why treat email differently on the basis that it is cheap to do so?  We recommend that you email your cold prospects no more than once a month for up to a year.  After a year of emails, it is likely that you will have to reach out to them by phone, post or social media and admit defeat on email. A quick phone call might reveal that they are not the right person in the company to make the decision.

No busy decision maker reads every email that arrives instantly.  Time management best practice dictates that successful business people filter emails into what is urgent and to be dealt with immediately, then maybe emails to be filed and then emails that are interesting and to read later. Realistically no senior decision maker will place an approach from a new supplier in the 'must read now' file.  Your first email should aim to be in the 'read and consider later' file. Give your prospect time to read your email.  It is probably best not to badger them with emails twice a week until they ask you to stop.

For email lists of busy decision makers in large companies see our page of email lists of directors and decision makers