How Often Should I Email?
This is one of those questions that everyone will give you a different answer on. So no matter what you’ve heard or read, you’ve got to read between the lines of suggested techniques and carve out your own strategy.
What’s the general consensus?
- Once a month – Perfect for your newsletter. Once a month is a good ground to work on for your much-anticipated newsletters, but a bit short on frequency if that’s the only email you send out.
- Twice a month – A bi-weekly email is a good balance, offering a regular flow of content without being seen as overloading your subscribers.
- Once a week – This is a popular frequency used by many companies to keep up a regular flow of content and allow your emails to be much smaller and more targeted to a specific subject.
- Twice a week – Useful if you are running a fast paced and ever changing business where communication is necessary at a regular interval, but don’t fall into the trap of over doing it and push your subscribers into feeling bombarded by your emails.
- Daily – There are very few times where this is appropriate. I wouldn’t suggest trying a daily email send, most people would be put off at the thought of receiving an email per day no matter how interested in your business they are.
How will I know if I’m emailing too often?
The proof can often be found in the analysis of your email send. If you are using an email service provider, they usually give you statistics on your email send. This varies depending on who you send your emails through, but they mostly all tell you the same thing.
What you are looking for is:
- Open rates – The amount of recipients who opened your email
- Click through rate – The amount of times a recipient has clicked on a link in your email.
- Bounce rate – The amount of emails you sent that went to an undeliverable email address. (If its high, you need to clean up your contact database)
- Unsubscribes – The amount of people who have chosen to opt out from future emails.
Looking through this data will give you a good idea of how successful your emails are. If your emails are getting opened by 50 – 60% of your contacts you may want to look at increasing the frequency of your emails as your audience seem to love what you’ve got to tell them. If they are getting 5 – 10% maybe try and rein the frequency in and focus your efforts on sending more appropriate content at a less frequent rate.
Conclusion
If you want to get the best from your emails, it is often necessary to take a step back and re-assess what you currently do, look at your email results and figure out if it’s working for you. Do this frequently to make sure your strategy changes with your customer’s demands.
If your email strategy hasn’t changed over the past year, now is probably the time to assess.
Don’t be afraid to try new techniques and don’t be afraid to change if they are not working for you. Email marketing is an art form and knowing your subscribers is the first step to mastering it.
