How Often Should You Be Emailing Your Customers?

Your email list is one of your most valuable marketing assets. Not only can you use it to further nurture the leads that have opted into your email list, but you can also use it to further increase sales and to develop relationships with current customers.

Determining what kind of content to send out to your email list can be challenging. The real challenge, however, lies in how often you should email your leads and customers. There’s a danger to both emailing your recipients too often and not often enough. Finding that sweet spot is vital to ensuring your email marketing efforts are effective.

The Danger of Emailing Too Often

Odds are you’ve put a great deal of effort into cultivating your email list. The last thing you want is to have wasted all the resources you’ve spent to capture your leads when they unsubscribe because you made the mistake of email blasting them every day for two weeks as soon as they opted in.

Nobody wants to see their inbox jam packed with emails from the same company. Even if your content is good, it’s going to feel like spam. Not only will many of your recipients not have the chance to read your emails if you’re sending out too many, but they may not even open them. Worst case scenario, they’ll begin deleting them as they come in, mark you as spam or even unsubscribe.

Of course, emailing them everyday is an extreme example – but emailing your recipients just slightly too often can have the same effect.

The Danger of Emailing Not Often Enough

While the last thing you want to do is email your recipients so often that they end up opting out, not emailing them enough can hurt your email marketing goals as well. You need to have regular contact with your recipients to establish and develop a relationship. If you’re only emailing your recipients once every couple of months, you won’t be able to do this.

In fact, one of the biggest risks you take in not emailing your recipients enough is that they completely forget who you are and why they opted in to your email list in the first place. One of the reasons you should be emailing them regularly is to keep your brand in the back of their mind.

Finding the Sweet Spot

So emailing too much is bad, but emailing too little is bad too. At this point you’re probably curious about how often you should be emailing your recipients. Unfortunately, there’s no exact science. To decide how often you should be emailing, you need to consider:

• What your ultimate email marketing goal is.

If your goal is to increase brand authority, then sending out an end-of-the week newsletter that recaps industry news for that week can be quite effective.

• Who your audience members are.

Don’t be afraid to send out surveys asking your list what they want out of your emails to help pinpoint how often you should be emailing them.

• Why they opted in to your email list in the first place.

Some leads may have signed up to take advantage of promotional offers while others may have just been interested in your newsletter. In this case, you’ll want to segment your email list so that they receive different amounts of emails with different types of content.

If you’ve been running an email marketing campaign for a while, one of the ways that you can identify your sweet spot is by tracking the results of previous emails. Check metrics like open rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rate and more over the course of your email marketing history. If you’ve changed the frequency of your emails at any point, compare those results to see if there was a change in results. For example, were you getting a higher open rate when you sent out emails every week instead of every two weeks?

One thing that is important is your consistency. If you decide to send out an email once a week…you need to do it once a week, every week. You can’t stop sending weekly emails for months, then pick it back up. This will have a negative effect since your recipients won’t know when to expect your emails, which means they’re more likely to miss out on them. Be consistent.

Determining how often you should email your recipients is important, but it’s not an exact science. Identify your email marketing goals, pay attention to your audience and keep track of your email marketing metrics to identify how often you should be emailing your leads and customers.