Best E-Mail Contact Strategy? You Decide

You are the marketer at a multichannel retailer. You decide to survey your customers about your e-mail practices, because pundits suggest that customers are now in control over your marketing activities.

Your customers surprise you. Instead of the one e-mail campaign you send them each week, customers overwhelmingly tell you they want a monthly e-mail, and maybe three additional campaigns for major sales events.

You eagerly set up a three month test, to understand the financial impact of the strategy your customers advocate. The results below are extrapolated to represent an entire year of campaigns.

E-Mail Test Results, Annualized To Total Housefile
	52 E-Mails	15 E-Mails
	Per Year	Per Year
Average List Size = 100,000
Average Open Rate	20.00%	25.00%
Average Click-Through	30.00%	33.00%
Average Conversion Rate	3.50%	3.80%
Purchase Rate	0.21%	0.31%
Average Order Size	$230	$235
Sales per E-Mail	$0.48	$0.74
Total Net Sales	$2,511,600	$1,105,088
Gross Margin	$1,255,800	$552,544
Less Marketing Cost	$15,600	$4,500
Less Pick/Pack/Ship	$376,740	$165,763
Variable Operating Profit	$863,460	$382,281

Pundits want you to let customers take charge of your marketing activities. In this case, you survey your customers, and they tell you they want fifteen e-mail campaigns a year. You test the strategy, and find out it will cost you nearly a half-million dollars of profit.

Let's assume that your CFO demands that you generate profit increases, not decreases. Let's assume you do not have the capabilities to tailor the e-mail strategy to the individual e-mail address.

What do you do? Do you listen to your customer, and convince your CFO that the customer is right, and the shareholders/owners are wrong? Or, do you ignore the feedback of your customers? I'm going to guess that you aim to please your CFO.