With all of the conveniences brought to us by our favorite email marketing platforms, it’s unfortunately really easy to send a truly spammy amount of emails to our customers.
But it’s also easy to send too few.
What exactly is the right amount? As usual, it’s a simple question with a complicated answer. Here’s how you can do some digging and find out how often your brand should be hitting send.
Every business you take on as a client is unique, which means their customers are unique too. It’s a nice idea to try and make a catch-all rule for email marketing frequency that works for every business—but that attempt will fall apart sooner than you think.
Basically, everybody looks at their emails differently. So while your business may cater to cat-lovers and your subscribers will all love cats, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a strategy that works for all of them.
There are very few people (honestly, I would argue almost nobody) who meticulously opens and interacts with every email. Apart from serial killers, no one has that level of commitment and focus.
Most people will leave around 30 to 40 percent of their emails unread and they’ll unsubscribe once a newsletter strays from their interests or starts to pop up too often.
You can’t please everybody! Some subscribers would love to receive an email from you every single day. Others will go into a rage if you send more than one email a week.
So how can you figure out what makes them happy?
Here are a few ideas:
- Why not just, you know, ask them? Create a survey to gauge how your customers feel about your email marketing. Ask them what they prefer. Ask enough customers these questions and you’ll be able to figure out how the majority feel.
- Are you personalizing? Not just adding your recipient’s name, but also custom recommendations. If not, you should look into it—it’s a great value-add (which we’ll talk more about later).
- Test. Split your email list into multiple lists. Call them Test A, Test B, Test C, etc. Send one list an email every day, and send another list an email every week, and the third bi-monthly. Compare the results. Look at how many people opened the emails, how many clicked through, and most importantly, how many unsubscribed. The more you test, the more you’re able to find the correct middle ground.
- Yes, I know you want to advertise Every. Single. Sale. But I’m telling you there’s nothing that will make your subs unsub faster. Unless you’re consistently offering 80 percent off on everything, it’s going to get tiring.
- Put yourself in the shoes of your subscriber. How would you feel about getting emails every 2 hours about a business? Most likely, annoyed.
These ideas may give you a lot of good information and data on your subscribers. But there’s one last thing you may want to consider: how often you send your email marketing might not be the problem.
I’m signed up to a bunch of mailing lists, some of which email me once or twice a day. While I find that to be excessive, I still haven’t unsubscribed. Why? Because those mailing lists offer something that other hyper-senders often don’t: value. They may overwhelm my inbox, but when I do I see a subject line that I like, and open their email, I know that the information within will be well written and thought out.
And that is the key: too much of a good thing doesn’t exist. Nobody will hate you for sending them lots of emails with valuable, quality content. Email marketing only becomes spam when the email has no purpose behind it and isn’t useful at all to the subscriber.
Improving your emails and their content is just as important as finding out the frequency of your email marketing. If your subscribers love your emails, they will actually enjoy receiving more of them!
