When it comes to taking risks with your marketing, it's all about finding a happy medium. While there are certainly plenty of tried-and-true techniques for optimizing your email and social media marketing, sometimes shaking things up a bit can pay off.

Unless you're already successful beyond your wildest dreams, there's always something more you could do to innovate and increase reader engagement. What's more boring and repetitive than a company that always, without fail, sends you the same content with the same sales pitch week in and week out?

If you spend most of your time testing, optimizing and perfecting your strategy, and you've established your brand and your voice, you can afford to throw the occasional curveball if it has the potential to score you a boost in audience engagement.

The trick to trying something unconventional is to think about the best and worst case scenarios and weigh the potential benefit against the risk.