How much is too much marketing?

Mark Kolier

It's so tempting. Sales are soft. Marketers have to do more with less. You have a substantial number of e-mail addresses of both customers and prospective customers who may have shown interest in your product or service. Why not increase the frequency of your email e-mail communication? Answer: Because it could do much more harm than good.

The power of communication has shifted to the consumer. In our marketing business, we recommend that you query your customers and prospects on how and how often they wish to receive your communications. This process places the customers' needs ahead of your marketing desires – and it results in more satisfied customer interactions and sales. We have also witnessed the impact first hand while running our own internet event based marketing company.

YourCover is a life-stage event-based company (births, birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, etc.) so we tend to step up our marketing frequency around dates that customers identified they have interest in remembering. We offer special promotions around events like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day for example, sending emails out first four then two weeks in advance of the event. Family birthdays are also often marked by those in our database and we send specific e-mail reminders to those who have opted in for them.

By continually respecting the preferences of our customers and prospects we maintain a very high percentage of our e-mail house file on a monthly basis. Like many companies we would welcome ways to spur more immediate sales but understand that that our long term strategy of listening to what people want, provides YourCover with a better customer relationship and consequently a better ROI. I've pulled together some of our lessons learned from e-mail campaigns with YourCover in the hope that you can adopt and adapt them in your marketing as well.