The Progressive Exchange conversation about mailing frequency I mentioned last week got a longer writeup at Care2's Frogloop detailing the harmful effects of not communicating often enough. Too cold! This morning, e-mail shop MailChimp reports on the inverse case of a client who pressed open rates from monthly to twice-monthly to twice-weekly and saw open rates drop by three-quarters, referencing another report of a commercial mailer who did better by doing less. Too hot! Test, test, test. There's just no substitute for sampling every bowl of porridge to find out for yourself what's just right. Okay, okay. A bushel of caveats here. First, as my original post on this subject mentioned, there's a very real question of what these metrics really mean relative to the goals of any given organization. Second, on a simple level, the M+R report covered at Care2 deals in click-through rates while MailChimp reports open rates and Email Marketing Best Practices mixes both conversion rates and open rates. Third, M+R is dealing with nonprofits and advocacy-type communicators while at least one and seemingly both of the counterexamples are commercial entities. Fourth, the counterexamples are obviously anecdotal -- although even M+R's report probably falls well short of a rigorously designed scientific survey -- and there's not a lot more information to unpack more of what's going on. So we're shamelessly comparing apples to oranges to porridge. It's a blog entry, not a peer-reviewed journal. Update: Courtesy of the always-elucidating Progressive Exchange list aforementioned MoveOn -- and wouldn't we like to get our mitts on their testing metrics? -- reported seeing no "threshold effects" when testing mailing frequency but simply a linear correlation that a certain percentage of people unsubscribe to every e-mail. It could be a different lay of the land for cause-oriented e-mailers. Mark Rovner, from who we cadged the original metrics post, speculated that overmailing could still cause disenchantment and disengagement with an organization or cause even if that sentiment is not always expressed immediately in the form of an unsubscribe, and pointed to this interview with marketing guru Seth Godin in which one exchange runs thusly:

What's the one thing companies should do once they assemble a database of customers who are willing to be marketed to? Godin: Almost every company does it wrong. I think marketers want to do the right thing but greedy managers won't let them. They want a quick profit. My best story is CDnow . They used to be the largest seller of CDs on the Internet. They accounted for 33% of all their sales [using] e-mail. First they sent out an e-mail every three weeks and sales went up. Then they sent it out every two weeks and sales sent up. Then every week and sales went up. Then every three days and sales went up. Then they sent an e-mail every day and sales went to zero. What they had done is not keep track of all the people they had alienated. Instead, companies need to treat [their customer database] like a treasured asset. If they did that, they'd do fine.