My mailbox, which was barely checked in January due to holidays, is full. Nearly two hundred emails, many from online stores. Company A announces that a promotion has been extended that gives you a 10 percent discount. Company B emails that the new collection is available and company C advises to quickly take advantage of pre-sale discounts.
14 emails from Rituals in a month
At one company it is a biweekly newsletter, at another it is a weekly or monthly newsletter. Some retail chains are very creative. For example, Rituals sends no fewer than 14 emails in a month. Sissy Boy sends 13 to a colleague in the same time.
Far too much, according to e-marketing professor Cor Molenaar. “You should only send a newsletter if you have something that interests the customer. Segment. Nowadays, companies can use tracking pixels, among other things, to see exactly when a customer opens a newsletter.”
And based on your clicking behavior, they also know which products you are interested in. Then they can put you in a separate cluster. “The cluster of customers who are interested in offers, for example,” says Molenaar.
The emails from Rituals have titles such as ‘How to survive Valentine’s Day’, ‘The winter sale ends’, ‘Suffering from the winter blues’ and a ‘Look back at 2023’. These emails appear to have been sent to every customer in the mail file. This also applies to Sissy Boy with no fewer than three emails about new collections and an email about winter must-haves.
Bagger
Sending a bulk of emails in the hope of selling something doesn’t work, Molenaar believes. “That has a negative effect. With such overkill, people no longer open the emails or it causes so much irritation that they unsubscribe from the newsletter. You lose that customer completely. An email like that with a look back at 2023, that’s just rubbish .”
Numerous studies have been conducted worldwide into how many people open a newsletter and whether they click through afterwards. The conclusion: roughly 30 percent of customers open a newsletter, but on average only 1 percent then clicks on a link in that letter.
“If you only send something if you really have something personal to say to the customer, many more people will click through,” says Molenaar. But how often should a store send a newsletter? That depends on the type of store, according to the professor.
Birthday promotion
For example, a supermarket has a high purchasing frequency, people come there at least once a week. “Such a store can easily send an email every week. But Rituals and Sissy Boy have a much lower purchase frequency. One email a month is already a lot. Send an email with birthdays, for example, and a non-personalized email a maximum of twice a year. message.”
Stores are not too generous with figures about the number of customers who unsubscribe from a newsletter. Those numbers are not too bad, says Bas Donkers, professor of marketing research at Erasmus University.
“Two years ago, we and a group of students conducted research at a commercial party. This showed that if people did not unsubscribe after the first ten emails, the chance that they would do so is small.”
However, the fact that only 1 percent of customers click through is not much. But creating such a newsletter also costs a store little money. “For example, TV advertisements are much more expensive and you don’t even know whether people will come to your (web) store as a result of that advertisement,” says Donkers.
Advertising on Facebook
We are also bombarded on social media with messages from stores we follow. However, customers are less likely to opt out of this, according to research by the University of Groningen.
Retail professor Laurens Sloot (RUG) talks about a study in which 2780 Facebook posts from 139 Dutch supermarkets were examined. “People only follow the stores that they find interesting. So there is a greater bond.”
Employee put in the spotlight
The number of posts per supermarket varied from one per month to ten posts per week. Not every post leads to the same number of responses, according to RUG PhD candidate Ton Wielheesen.
“Some stores include posts from head office with the advertising brochure. This receives fewer responses than when a store, for example, spotlights employees who have a birthday or are celebrating an anniversary. The most important thing is that there is variety in the type of posts.”
‘There are always unsubscribes’
Still, their strategy works quite well, says Sissy-Boy. “We personalize a lot in our mailings and have run various campaigns that are sent based on customer activity. We do not see low open rates and click rates at Sissy-Boy,” says Laura van der Kallen, responsible for relationship marketing.
There are also people who unsubscribe from the newsletters. “You have that with every (commercial) mailing. And if you mail more often during the week, you also have more unsubscribers.” However, the number of people who open the newsletters does not decrease if emails are sent more often during the week.
At Rituals, few customers unsubscribe from the newsletters. According to a company spokesperson, this is ‘due to the relevant offer’ in the emails.
“Newsletter subscribers can adjust their information preferences themselves. This allows us to share personalized content.”
2024-02-17 07:50:44
#Stores #risk #losing #customers #due #excessive #emailing
