How much is too much?

And equally important, how much is too little? Too much and too little can both be bad when it comes to e-marketing.

People ask me how often they should send out their newsletter and I always answer the same thing - as often as you can bring value to your subscribers. And if you can do that every single day, yippee! I myself subscribe to 4 daily newsletters.

Back to reality... of course, there's work involved and that might have an impact on how often you send too. I do strongly believe that you need to send something at least once a month to be having any impact.

Here's a general rule of thumb:
more frequent = smaller amounts of content, and vice versa
(Now remember, rules are made to be broken so perhaps I should call this a guideline instead.)
Of course, social media is a great example of the 'more frequent' strategy.

Aside from how much content, you'll also want to consider the type of content in relation to the frequency. Here are a couple of very different strategies:
  1. One main message in a format that will attract all of your subscribers – by default, this means fairly brief, or brief sections; videos and blog posts fit here. This can be more frequent.
  2. A variety of content aimed to provide at least one thing of interest to every reader; each reader will read something but not necessarily everything – this means more content and of varying lengths and types (e.g. concepts and applications). This would be less frequent. (This is the strategy I adopted for my own newsletter right from the start.)
So you may think that I haven't really answered the question I posed at the start - how much is too much? I do hope I've given you some ways to think about what would be the right answer for you... because of course, 'it depends'.

Please share your opinions and experiences by commenting.

Comments

  1. The Phone LadyNovember 10, 2011 at 4:16 PM

    This is a great post, Linda. I was just reading an article the other day where an "expert" was recommending that entrepreneurs should aim to blog once a month, although weekly would be amazing. And weekly is possible, but only if you keep the content relatively short and entertaining. The bottom line is that you can continually contribute to your company's growth by frequently connecting with your customers and potential customers, but only if you provide them with valuable information that doesn't take up too much of their time. At least that's my opinion. I'd love to hear others' opinions.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Linda DaleyNovember 11, 2011 at 6:42 AM

    Oh my, blogging once a month hardly seems worth it (although I haven't done much better lately). And of course, it's one thing to blog and quite another to draw people to read it. That's where email and social media become important.

    ReplyDelete

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