How many is too many?

We’ve just implemented a rule of no more than 1 email per constituent per week.  Everybody has to put their lists together ahead of time, and then we run them through a single extraction per a hierarchy determined by the various departments to dedupe them against each other, then distribute the lists back to the departments for export and emailing.  We felt like we were getting complaints from people who found themselves on multiple lists, and hence, were getting many emails from us every week.  Complaints seem to have gone down.

Kirk Mortensen

Database Administrator

TheatreWorks

Hi there,

I'd like to get an idea of how many promotional emails people are sending out per month? Does anyone have strict policies on the number of emails that are sent (or rather, the number of emails an individual patron can receive) from your organisation?

I'm on a bid to limit our frequency of emails and get some solid guidelines in place - but need support by way of other examples!

I'm particularly interested to hear from other venues who frequently deal with outside promoters - we are bombarded with requests for dedicated emails from all of our promoters and am interested to hear how often people are actually saying 'no' to them!

Thanks

Emma

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We deal with promoters all the time, and we’ve generally made it work by doing pre-sale emails with them, and then folding their “asks” into our overall email strategy.  We send one major weekly email to our large list, and then try to limit other specific emails to specific populations.  We haven’t done a promoter only email blast (other than a pre-sale) in a while. 

As for how many per month, it varies, but we try to keep the “non transactional” emails down to two a week.  I’m pushing to limit that even further, because the more emails we send, the more they don’t read the transactional ones, and that’s a challenge when you’re trying to communicate time changes or special parking info.

Good luck!

Jodi Beznoska

VP, Communications

Walton Arts Center

Hi Emma -

We don't have a hard and fast rule, but we have a rule of thumb that we only send one non-transactional email to a customer per week. We consider anything having to do with reminders of a show coming up, thank you for coming or email receipts exempt from the count.

We have a weekly meeting COP (Communicating with Our Patrons) that is cross departmental and looks at everything being mailed/emailed/phoned for the upcoming weeks. If we see times where someone might be getting too much from us, we'll prioritize what group gets suppressed from what so that a patron is only receiving no more than about one message from us per week. 

Part of our strategy is that we don't want to bombard people with multiple messages and muddy the waters - so what is our priority. Part of it is just staff overload in creating the emails and part of it is watching our unsubscribe and open rates. We find that when we send out multiple emails in close succession, even if someone has subscribed to them, there is a small bump in the unsubscribe of the second email.

We don't have to deal with outside promoters usually - if we have a rental who wants to send out to our list, we make them fit in with our already planned emails and they get bumped for any of our own emails.

HTH,

Heather
Seattle Rep