How Frequently Should You Mail Your Newsletter?
Let’s talk about the frequency of sending out your newsletter and the pros and the cons of each.
First, you could choose to mail your newsletter on the day each client bills. Now, mailing then as they bill is a good system but there’s a lot of work that comes with trying to mail them every day out to your client base. It’s going to be a lot of work for you and it’s going to be a lot of work for the fulfillment house which is one of the reasons that it prices out unfavorably on this particular model.
Every day would be ideal, but you’ve got to look at your business and see if every day is actually practical. Now if you’re someone who has an employee in-house that is doing other things and has time, then that’s not such a big deal and you certainly could make it work. As each client bills; they bill you go ahead and mail out their newsletter.
Another model would be to mail your newsletter out weekly. There’s good and bad when it comes to mailing out weekly. For example, if you mail out let’s say every Friday of the month; and it’s the first Friday, you are only mailing out to the people that have billed in that seven day period. So, after the first week, you have only mailed out to what most likely would be about ¼ of your subscribers. So effectively, everybody else that has not billed obviously has not received their January newsletter yet. You repeat the next Friday and so on.
As you can see, ½ of your subscribers would not receive their January newsletter for over two weeks-and we haven’t even taken into consideration the time it takes to get delivered. In reality, over ½ of your subscribers would not receive the newsletter until 3 plus weeks into the month. The last week would actually start receiving their newsletters after the month has already ended. As you can see, you start running into a little bit of a timeliness issue which could aggravate some of your subscribers.
Another choice would be to mail once a month. What’s going to get you when you mail monthly is, let’s say you don’t want to have that timely issue, so you say I want to mail the October issue after the first week of October. Well you are going to run into billing and cancellation issues with a lot of folks. If you have a big subscription list of let’s say over 1000 subscribers or so, there’s going to be a potential of 5-10% that aren’t going to bill out one way or another.
As mentioned, there are going to be cancellations. There are gong to be billings that don’t go through. These are things you need to consider in your business model. In the example above, you’ve just mailed 5-10% of your list that has not paid for the product and you have costs. You have cost of mailing, cost of product and all of that has to be factored in.
So that model isn’t necessarily a great one because it will cost you money in the end. If you ship to somebody that hasn’t paid that’s money out of your pocket and you have to keep that in mind.
Let’s look at that one more time just to break this down. Say you mail it out the first of the month. Say you have 1000 subscriptions and let’s just say you have 20% attrition through cancellations, billing, etc…. Also, keep in mind that your industries or niches rate may be lower or potentially it may be higher as well. At 20% attrition, you have 200 people that don’t pay which at $40 per newsletter is $8000 that doesn’t come in or process.
Now let’s just say you’ve mailed out the 1st of the month. If you calculate the cost of your CD, your DVD, your printed newsletter, by the time you add in postage, in-house labor costs or fulfillment costs, let’s just say all that is 5 dollars per issue to keep the math simple when all is said and done.
You now have the 20% or 200 people that didn’t bill and you paid this cost. That’s $1000 that you paid out of your pocket and is a direct loss not even counting the $8,000 monthly income loss because they didn’t bill. That’s a $9,000 dollar swing which can really make a difference in your business.
For many businesses that could be a major break right there at least for the newsletter portion of it. When you have money going out and it didn’t bill that is just not a good business model. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. From what we’ve seen between billing and cancellations you might just have a good 15-20% that do wash out, that don’t bill every month and you need to account for that and add that to your model.
Of course, obviously you need to keep growing your newsletter business but for expenses and things like that you have to make that part of your model or it’s just not going to work for you
Yes, in an ideal world preference is to mail daily. Reality is it’s going to be very difficult to do that unless you’re at the point where you have got 10, 15, 20 thousand people paying every month. Then you can have a dedicated company where that is just a part of their business every single day. What we have seen as manageable and what most folks can pretty much handle work and time wise is once a week.