Having the right impact

Sometimes, 'us bloggers' get so carried away in the white heat of creative angst, that we forget about the impact on readers.  I was reminded of this last week when visiting a Member firm, where one key adviser is now suffering from clinical depression as a result of reading KevBlog.

OK, so that's a slight over-exaggeration ('us bloggers' do that too).  The individual's PA did comment that his head would droop progressively lower over his desktop as he worked his way through one of my unbalanced, spleen-laden diatribes, until he had to be led into a darkened room to recover, preferably with the aid of Gin.

This was a surprise to me.  Not only had it never occurred to me that people would actually read this stuff, the fact that they would take it seriously came as a revelation.

This experience led me to think again about the impact of our communications on both clients and potential clients.  At 2020FS we try to tread that fine line between communicating enough and overdoing things so people tune you out.  How many critical updates is 'enough'?

These days, because of the obvious cost-benefits, professional firms conduct a lot of their marketing via email.  The problem is, every time you send one, a very small proportion of your subscribers will choose to opt-out.  Because we work hard to build up emailing databases for marketing purposes, we don't want that to happen - but at the same time, we do want to keep our business and our services in front of both existing and potential clients.  So, at what point does 'enough' become 'too much'?

Having done some research on the subject, I can tell you that if the opt-out rate for your marketing emails is anything up to 0.1%, then you may rest assured that you are not sending too many.  If the rate rises to between 0.2-0.4%, then you're overdoing things, so you need to reduce your email frequency.

We can rephrase the lesson like this: if you have a low opt-out rate amongst your subscribers, then you simply aren't marketing enough to them.