Email Frequency: What’s The Sweet Spot?

Finding the right email frequency is a challenge for every business. You’ve got to think about how many emails you should be sending, while balancing how many emails your customers would be okay receiving.

It can all be a bit much. If you’re looking for the answer to this question:

“How often should I send marketing emails?”

We don’t have a definitive answer for you. But, there are a few best practices that will help you find the sweet spot.

5 Email Frequency Best Practices

1. Study industry averages

Email frequency varies across the board, but it can be helpful to look at what similar companies in your industry are doing. So, here’s a quick table of average sends sourced from The Seventh Sense:

As you can see, these aren’t high monthly send numbers. So you can assume that, if you’re in one of these industries, your audience doesn’t want to receive more than 2 emails a week.

A good place to start would be sending out 1 or 2 emails a week and see what the results are. From there, you can tweak either by increasing or decreasing your send frequency, based on your open rate and unsubscribes. This is a sure-fire way to find the sweet spot for your email marketing.

2. Base send frequency on customer lifecycle

Your customer lifecycle refers to the stages that a prospective, or existing, customer progresses through a sales funnel. So, a business selling clothing will have a shorter customer lifecycle  than a business selling mining machinery.

For this reason, it’s best to base your email send frequency on your customer lifecycle. If your customers typically repeat purchase every 6 months, they probably won’t want to receive product marketing emails right after they’ve made a purchase.

So, if you have a select audience that you think will like to hear from you more often, consider segmenting the list so that you make the most of your email marketing. We’ve written an article on list segmentation to make it easy for you, check it out here.

3. Identify your email goals

One of the biggest things to consider when finding your send frequency sweet spot is the actual goal of your email.

Are you trying to sell a new product? Driving customers to existing stock? Showing off an exclusive deal?

Whatever it might be, it’s best to think about the goal and how to get your emails in front of the right people. Again, list segmentation can be a useful strategy for this.

4. Avoid the spam filter

It doesn’t matter if you’ve come up with a catchy subject line, clever content or included great images if your email doesn’t make it to your customers’ inboxes. That’s why avoiding the spam filter is key, and your email send frequency has a lot to do with this.

If you were receiving 3 emails per day you’d get over it pretty quickly, right? You’re not alone. Marketing Sherpa found that while over 80% of people want to receive monthly emails, less than 20% want daily emails. Too many emails is the number 1 reason people unsubscribe and mark emails as spam.

Daily emails get annoying real quick, and send red flags to email providers and recipients. It’s like a mosquito that you can hear buzzing but can’t see. Don’t be the mosquito or you’ll find your emails hitting spam folders more often than not!

5. Look for signs of email fatigue

If you’ve noticed a decrease in your opens or click-through rate, you might have a case of email fatigue.

Email fatigue generally means you’ve sent your audience too many emails, and quite frankly, they’re over it. So, they won’t engage.

Instead of steaming right ahead with your cunning plan, take a step back and re-evaluate what this is telling you about your audience. They’re uninterested, disengaged and are likely to turn into an unsubscribe soon. So, this tells you that you need to email less and maybe even look at the list you’re sending to again.

So, what’s the best day and time to send?

According to research gathered from CoSchedule Blog the best days to send are:

1. Tuesday
2. Thursday
3. Wednesday

Research by GetResponse, suggests that Tuesday was the most popular day of the week to send emails—17% of emails were sent on a Tuesday. Overall, Tuesday also returned the highest open rate of all days at 18%.

In the same study by CoSchedule Blog, they found that the best times to send emails is at:

1. 10AM
2. 8PM
3. 2PM
4. 6AM

Of course, sending your emails out on a Tuesday at 10AM may not work best for your business, so it’s important to trial different days and times to see what works for you and more importantly, your audience.

So, do you think you’ve found your email frequency sweet spot? Let us know in the comments below.

Sources: theseventhsense.com, coshedule.com, sendgrid.com, customer.io