Marketing Email Frequency: How to Find Your Sweet Spot

Every email marketer has nightmares about their emails being marked as spam. You wonder how this could have happened. Did you send too many emails? Too few? The good news is, 91% of the respondents to a survey by Marketing Sherpa said they had no qualms about receiving promotional emails. Yes, it’s possible your timing is off, but hey—they do want your content! The question is: How often do they want it?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of finding that perfect number, there’s one thing you have to know: A number of emails you send are completely irrelevant if you’re not sending interesting, relevant content.

Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, and it generates more than three times as many leads. Salespeople go by the ABCs: Always Be Closing; Marketers have to follow something slightly different, the ACV: Always Create Value.

Okay, so now we’ve established consumers want your emails and you’re sending them relevant content. That just leaves you with the problem of finding your own perfect marketing email frequency. Fortunately, it’s a solvable problem. Find out how to do it:

Analyze the Past

You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been, right? The same goes for email marketing. Before you can figure out your sweet spot, you have to take a careful look at what you’ve been doing so far. Your email marketing platform, be it Campaign Monitor, Emma, Hubspot or anything else, will have some analytics tools to help you out. In order to measure past email success, consider the following metrics:

• Open Rate
• Click Through Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate

Almost everything you need to know is hidden in those numbers. You just have to analyze the data from your previous sends for patterns. Look at your most highly engaged subscribers and find out how often they’re opening emails, and on what days.

We know, generally speaking, the best day to send an email is Tuesday, and overall, email giant Campaign Monitor found the sweet spot for email sends is every two weeks. But that may not be true for your industry. While that gives you a good place to start, email is all about targeting your specific audience. Your data will give you insights on what’s working best for your industry, so worry less about what’s “best practice” and more about what works for you.

Determine Your Goals

So you’ve looked at the numbers, and you have some idea of what seems to be best for your audience. Great! Now it’s time to figure out what your campaign goals are and how your industry affects your send time. Targeting for your audience can make or break your strategy because segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue. If you’re sending general blasts to your entire list, you’re missing out. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Campaign goal: Are you trying to generate leads? Sell a product? Update your subscribers with the latest news?
• Industry: Are you a SaaS company? Probably best to send during regular office hours. Home improvement store? Send in the evening or the weekend, when your audience is at home.
• Your competitors: What are others in your industry doing? Sign up for some of their lists and take note of what and when they send.

Ultimately, you want consistent delivery of value without annoying your audience, and you want to keep your subscribers from marking you as spam. In a perfect world, people will look forward to receiving your emails and the value they provide.

A Final Note

People who have subscribed to your lists actually want to hear from you. They’re interested in your business and what value you have to offer. If you’re still concerned about the frequency of your emails, let your subscribers know right away what they’re signing up for.

76% of marketers are seeing active growth in their number of email subscribers, so a welcome email should be in place to let them know what they’ll be getting and when.

At the very least, send one email a month, or your subscribers are going to forget about you. In fact, 86% of people would like to receive promo emails at least monthly. If you wait longer than that, it’s like you’re starting your relationship with them from scratch every time you send out an email.

Finding your email frequency sweet spot is going to take a bit of work, a bit of trial and error and a bit of time. However, making it a priority in your email marketing strategy will benefit your bottom line in the long run. If you’d like a little more in-depth help with your strategy, Red Branch Media’s email marketing team is here to help you out.

The Branchers

We build the best damn marketing campaigns on the planet. And we do it for industries and companies you might not identify as easy to market (right away). Working here takes a very special kind of person.