When Should You Email Your Customers?

As a member of Robert Earl Keen’s email list, Ryan received this ad yesterday and shared it with the rest of the company. I shared it with a dozen people because I thought it was so awesome. Now, I’m sharing it with you.

It follows one of our golden rules for when to hold/send email and direct mail promotion:

Find unusual-but-relevant holidays to celebrate. Here, Keen is tying the message/promotion to an unusual theme.

This has two direct and immediate benefits:

1. You won’t be emailing the same day as everybody else.
2. Your email will surprise people – instantly passing through the gatekeeper in their brains on the lookout for boring, irrelevant stuff – but it will still have an impact because it’s not just weird, but weird AND relevant.

Tons of companies celebrate President’s Day with promotions. Everyone celebrates Black Friday with promotions. (And NO ONE should celebrate certain days with certain kinds of promotions.)

Look through the calendar… google “unusual events in October” or “silly holidays.”

Brainstorm with your team on how to tie-in promotions to those holidays. (Here’s how to double the output of your next brainstorming session.)

• If you’re a pizza place, maybe you celebrate the signing of the International Cheese Treaty.
• If you’re a creative company, maybe you close on Jim Henson’s birthday.
• If you’re an ice cream or fro-yo place, maybe you give away free cones on the first day of Spring.
• If you’re a heating an air company, maybe you send out an email offering to change customers smoke detector batteries for free on the first day of Fall.

Conventional wisdom tells most companies to send out email “newsletters” on the first Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday of each month.

Why? Don’t you agree that conventional wisdom tends to be more convention than actual wisdom?

[Tweet “When considering when to send your emails and promotions, be weird… but relevant.”]

Avoid emailing when everyone else does.

Find unusual-but-relevant reasons. Make them either relevant to your industry (Groundhog Day for a heating and air company, for example) or your promotion.

Last week, Lynn gave you some good advice for humanizing the content of your emails, and Ryan clearly showed you when NOT to send emails. Now, hopefully, you have at least one good strategy for when TO send them.

Action Item: Plan to send one spontaneous and weird email to your customers in Q4 (Oct. – Dec.). Have a contest with your staff. Ask each member of your team to pick a date and a promotion and explain how they’re tied together. The weirder-but-relevanter the better! Winner wins something awesome.