5 Important factors when building your email timeline

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As if deciding what to send, and then drafting an email  to a client wasn’t hard enough, deciding when to send it is equally difficult. You don’t want to scare your prospective away with a barrage of emails, let them feel ignored, or send them something they’re not really interested in. So what do you send?

Fortunately, most of the homework’s already been done for you. After, signing up for any well reputed (or competitive) service, you’ll get a string of emails. Giving you some clues as to what everyone is sending, and how much is too much (or too little).

I wouldn’t recommend copying somebody’s else timing & format, but it’s great inspiration, and you can certainly learn from it. The summary below details the set of emails received from FuzeBox after signing up for their Free Trial.

  • Day 1 – Automated, Welcome Email
  • Day 1 – Automated, Welcome to the 14 day free Trial
  • Day 1 – Personal email, introduction & courtesy email
  • Day 3 – Automated, Training email, how to host meetings
  • Day 5 – Automated,Training email, how to ensure high quality audio
  • Day 8 – Automated,Promotional email, why it’s worth doing
  • Day 11 – Personal, Promotional email, benefits of the service
  • Day 14 – Automated, Reminder that the trial ends
  • Day 29 – Personal, follow-up email to check if we’re still interested

When conducting your tests, and planning your email timeline, I’d recommend  keeping track of the following factors:

  1. Type of email; how would you classify the email? Personal, obviously templated, informative, promotional, etc.
  2. Sender; who did each mail come from? Was it from a no-reply address, signed by an individual? What happens when you hit reply?
  3. Design; are all the emails following the same style/format? Are they mobile friendly? Are they easily readable in various clients?
  4. CTA; what did the email want you to do? what message is it trying to communicate?
  5. Stop date; when do the emails stop? At what point is your “lead” disregarded?