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By Peter Norton

One of my favorite questions to ask clients is, “Do you know if you are sending the right amount of email to your subscribers?” Most of the time, the answer is “I think so…why?”

For such an important question, I prefer to hear a definitive answer. The point is that guessing is not enough – you need to have the hard data to support a “yes” or “no” answer.

Of course, the next question is typically, “How can I figure this out?” While there are a few different ways, the following testing matrix below is a great resource to get the answer.

The matrix above represents an example mailing list of one million records that has been divided into 4 groups of 250,000. Let’s say you are currently sending 10 times per month to your entire list. What you need to do is break up it into 4 equal groups to test different email campaign sending frequencies. Over the course of a 30-day period, you could try sending 2 emails a month to Group 1, then 4 emails to Group 2, and so on. At the end of the cycle, you can tally and compare the results to see what performed best. The following chart breaks out sample response rates for this particular example.

After reviewing the results above, you can see that 2 to 4 emails per month seems to be the sweet spot for this example exercise. The last line that refers to “No Response to emails” is probably the most important area to focus on. The goal is to have as many people possible open your emails, not just for 1 mailing, but for all your whole series of mailings over time.

As you can see from this test above, there still was a great deal of people who did not even open one email campaign. The next step would be to see how these results stack up to your typical 10-mailings-per month metrics.

You can conduct this test anytime, but many of my clients do it when they make a message change to the email marketing channel or with the addition of a new section to an email campaign template.

Of course, there are many other metrics that you should be testing as well. The bottom line is that you should always be thinking of how you can make your email channel more effective, and that includes considering how your recipient sees it.

The goal is to remain top of mind with them and create excitement for the next email to come – and email campaign frequency plays a big role here. If you don’t know whether your subscribers are getting tired of all of your emails, you will find your emails being filed away for a rainy day…along with another thousand or so!

Earlier this week I watched my son play basketball against a 2nd grader that was a full foot taller than him. Needless to say it was a loooong game! Sometime during the 2nd quarter I got to thinking about how some of the small businesses I work with use email to make themselves appear "taller" in the eyes of their competitors and customers...to bad email can't make my son 6'2! Click here to read my MediaPost emailINSIDER blog on how SMBs can leverage the email channel to compete with their larger peers.

The more I work with large enterprises the more excited I become when IT and marketing collaborate to enhance the customer experience. So I have to ask the question: Why do the two departments so rarely get along? Check out my thoughts on why the two teams MUST partner in my latest article on MediaPost’s Email Insider titled: Have You Hugged Your CIO Today?