How often should we email our list?

If you’ve been using email for your company’s marketing and client outreach for any amount of time, you’ve probably wondered where the sweet spot is for email frequency. Email too much and your list gets fatigued; email too little and you lose engagement and relevancy. 

There are many variables to consider when trying to determine how much email a particular subscriber will accept:

• How did they opt-in to your list?
• How often do they engage with your emails?
• Do they visit your website?
• Do they purchase from you or consume your content?

It’s easy to damage your list via spam complaints and unsubscribes, and you can damage your brand equity as well, if you email too frequently. 

But what if you email too infrequently?

If you don’t send email often enough, you risk harming your email program. 

An infrequent or sporadic email schedule causes subscribers to forget they’ve opted in to receiving messages from you, prompting them to unsubscribe or push your emails to spam. In turn, this can negatively impact your reputation with their ISPs, routing all future emails from you to spam or blocking them completely.

Infrequent email schedules also make it more difficult to identify those on your list who you might label as “inactive”. Segmenting your list into “actives” vs. “inactives” is an important tactic for increasing your email deliverability.  

Finding the Right Balance

At a minimum we suggest emailing your list at least twice per month if you have a less active program currently. From there, you’ll be able to test more frequent emails and ramp up your program to a level at which your subscribers are comfortable and become more engaged.

Ecommerce brands will be able to email up to several times per week, provided there are offers and promotions to share that your audience will find relevant. Testing comes into play here as well, when you are able to segment your list in order to communicate most effectively.

Once you have a content calendar in place and a plan for your email schedule, testing will be key in determining what email content, frequency or other ideas work for your organization. 

If you need help planning and executing an email program that keeps your audience engaged and produces results, we would love to talk with you. To tap into our expertise please reach out for a consultation call.