We all know the economy is in the pooper. During these times companies are focusing on high-ROI, low cost tactics such as email marketing. The challenge now becomes how to e-market successfully without making your loyal subscribers suffer. Check out these common e-marketing myths courtesy of MarketingSherpa.com

Myth 1 – It’s the size that matters

It’s easy for novice e-marketers to be concerned with the size of their mailing list. But just as your mama always said, size doesn’t always matter.

Truth:

The percentage of opt-in names that actually purchase or interact with your company falls into a 90/10 or 80/20 split.

Since only 10% to 20% of those opt-in names are actual buyers, spend more time attracting real customers or qualified prospects to your list.

Truth:

Low-quality names can hurt your email reputation, which impacts overall deliverability.

Low-quality names added to pump up your list increase the chances that someone who’s not really interested in your email messages will hit the spam button. Getting too many spam complaints, can close the doors to major ISPs or big company firewalls and decrease deliverability.

Truth:

Co-registration, sweepstakes, and list rental are fast ways to grow a list but don’t always generate high-quality names.

In fact, the proper way to manage those processes requires strategies that can be just as time and resource-consuming as the tried and true way of attracting subscribers.

Invest in high-quality content to get quality subscribers to register. Quality subscribers = increased conversions and long-term loyalty.

Myth 2: More emails = more revenue

Sending more frequent emails doesn’t always mean increased sales or conversions; in fact in most cases increasing frequency without a clear game plan or objective can hurt your list in the long run.

Truth:

Subscribers pay more attention to the frequency of email from a specific sender than they do overall volume of email.

When MarketingSherpa.com asked email subscribers why they unsubscribed or stopped reading messages from a company:

• 58% said the emails weren’t relevant to them
• 44% said they received too much email from the sender
• 31% said they simply receive too much email overall to pay attention to it all

Truth:

Benchmarks for the appropriate email frequency are tough to come by. How often you can send to your subscribers depends on the nature of your mailings and your audience.

For that reason, as always test, test and re-test. Yes it is time consuming, but it’s better than over-sending to your list and losing subscribers. Think about your email list as a long-term relationship. It takes time and resources to woo them, and trust us, bombarding them with unwanted emails is not the way to achieve that.

If you do want to ramp up frequency do it for a reason and take the time to make sure your list won’t hate you for it in the morning. Check out how one company increased list frequency without hurting their list.

MarketingSherpa researches what works in marketing via exclusive Case Studies, surveys, results data analysis and lab tests. For more info,  please visit MarketingSherpa.com