How frequently should your business send out emails? Experienced marketers learn that they will begin to experience diminishing returns if they email too frequently or not frequently enough. Potential customers may start to consider the messages as annoying spam if they see a new one every time they open their inbox.
On the other hand, if emails don’t go out often enough, consumers may lose interest, forget about your brand entirely, or even wonder if you have abandoned them or something is wrong with your company.
Finding the Sweet Spot in Timing Emails
Finding the sweet spot that produces the greatest number of responses and the lowest number of people who unsubscribe can become a critical factor in the success or failure of your email campaign.
Of course, marketers have to do more than just look at the numbers. In some cases, the people who unsubscribe do not really belong to the targeted market and might just be weeding themselves out. With that in mind, consider some examples of companies that needed to run some tests in order to time their campaigns to produce the best results.
Timing Email Frequency for Best Results
An Entrepeneur.com article called “How Frequently Should You be Sending Out Your Email Newsletter” reviewed the experiences of different companies with different kinds of email offers. In one example, a newsletter that offered curated content for a particular industry niche found a much better response-to-unsubscriber ratio when the frequency was reduced from once a day to once a week.
However, reducing frequency was not the right answer for every company reviewed. In another example, a company with offers for wholesale beauty products tried reducing frequency from about weekly to monthly. A lot of members had unsubscribed from their list, and the marketers assumed that they had mailed too often.
The email marketers expressed surprise when they received feedback from their customers indicating disappointment that offers did not come as frequently as they used to. They ended up returning to their old schedule and even increasing the frequency during some times when they had more offers to share.
Consider the Goal of Your Email Campaigns
Consider the case of the wholesale beauty products company. Increasing frequency might have encouraged some people to unsubscribe, but those were not the good customers who were actually making frequent purchases. The real goal of email marketing isn’t just to rapidly grow an email list. An email list is a tool. In order to figure out how to use that tool effectively, it is really important to know what you want it to do.
In some cases, companies might want to use email to help increase sales, attract new customers, retain old ones, or achieve some combination of these goals. The only way to time emails right for your purposes is to consider your goals and test some different strategies. In some cases, it might be best to set up separate email campaigns for different targets. The only way to figure out the best frequency for your email marketing is to consider your own goals and run some tests.
