This season I'm going to be doing some aggressive pruning to our Japanese maples.
The previous owner didn't take care of them well so they've grown into mutant octopus trees.
They are so dense with leafs and twigs that I've been forced to wait until they drop their leafs to actually see what I can prune. But once that happens, snip snip snip.
This will probably be the first year of many years to restore them. I can't go from 0 to done in one season or they'll grow back worse next year.
Instead I have to budget my cuts and work on them little by little each year.
This process works well for reviving an old email list.
If you have an old list you haven't emailed in forever, jumping right in to mailing every week or every few days will be a shock to the list and will have negative results.
A better plan is to start emailing once a month, keep that up for say six months, and then shift to once per week.
That'll give people enough time to get used to hearing from you and decide if they want to stay subscribed or not.
For new customers, you could start then off with a more frequent schedule because they don't have any prior experience. They haven't had years of growing branches the wrong way you need to chop through.
That's why I recommend a strong New Customer Welcome campaign that every new customer is sent. You can make sure they see your best content and after a bit of a delay you can transition to sales and marketing messages.
How long of a delay? Using the Customer Purchase Latency report in my app you can get a good idea based on your customers buying habits. I'd aim to start major sales messages a bit before the Latency time between the 1st and 2nd orders. e.g. start it around 80 days if your Latency is 100 days.
Eric Davis
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