How often should you send marketing emails to your customers?

I think this article starts off completely on the wrong foot. ?Know your goals‘ is a good point- but it’s all about you. This should start with: ?Know your audience.‘ Because the first question you should ask yourself is: ?How often does your target audience make a decision relevant to your product?‘. This is your starting point to determine the frequency of any touchpoint. Understandably your product is the most important thing to you. But you need to understand when it is important to your target audience. These are the moments when your communication may be relevant.

The thing about sending marketing emails is that it's not about the frequency; it's about the value you're delivering. Bombarding your audience won't make you unforgettable; delivering something they can't wait to open will. Respect their attention, be generous, and remember, it's not about how often you knock; it's about what you bring when you show up. Remember, email marketing is a relationship, not a transaction. Treat your subscribers with respect, value their time, and prioritize their needs above all else. By doing so, you'll cultivate a loyal following that eagerly awaits your next message. Monitor and adapt should be your email frequency mantra.

Communication is not about the speaker, but the listener. Only speak when you can improve the silence, as they say. Strategies to have something worth saying any day of the week: 1. Listen to your audience actively. Send answers to questions they have right now. 2. Have a train that is leaving the station. Always have a momentum of something important you're organizing, like an event or a product announcement. 3. Target your content based on buying behaviour. Provide prompts to guide audience to get to the next stage in the buying process, overcome objections, and prompt them to get back in touch with you. The worst thing you can do is keep sending emails with no audience value. People will stop listening to you.

Like anything else, marketing outreach (ie emails) have very little to do with the tool and everything to do with the audience. Who is your audience, what value are you contributing, how can you help them, what next step is the goal, etc? Marketing should be the direct result of a thoughtful market engagement approach that has multi layers / goals : prospect driven, lead development, account management, etc. The focus is always the customer and their needs. Answering that question will inform how marketing can amplify and engage.

Your email marketing plan should follow your customer journey. When do your audiences need brand awareness messaging, when do they need product/service information, when might they need special offers to drive decision-making, etc. It all comes down to your segmented audiences and where they are on their journey with your organization.

To further break this down, Imagine you’re a chef preparing a feast for a group of guests. Now, each guest has unique tastes, dietary preferences, and favorite dishes. Some are adventurous foodies, always ready to try something new and everything, while others prefer sticking to their all-time favorites. Your subscribers are like these guests. They don’t all have the same appetites or needs for information. So, just as you’d customize your menu to cater to different palates, it’s crucial to segment your customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and history. By tailoring your email frequency to match the tastes of each segment, you’re essentially serving up a delightful and personalized feast of information.

Your email marketing frequency should be based on your typical customer's purchase cycle and profile. It's best to find a balance between top-of-mind awareness and not becoming too spammy by sending out emails too often. Omnisend data shows that sending 10–19 emails per month can bring the best result

Segmenting your email audience is crucial for personalized communication. For example, if an online retailer segments customers based on their purchase history, they can send tailored promotions to frequent buyers and re-engagement emails to those who haven't made a purchase recently. This targeted approach boosts engagement and conversion rates by delivering content that matches each group's preferences and behavior.

The worst thing any business can do is inundate their customers with communication they don’t want or need. Set up email, text and other (app or snail mail) notification options for promotions, new products, brand news, blog info, etc… so that the customer can customize what, when and how they receive communications from you. Blanket, mass e-mailings repeated too frequently are not only a nuisance they can turn an infrequent or only occasional customer away forever! Be selective and judicious in your communications, your customers will thank you for it by staying on your lists and not unsubscribing.

Creating a customized email symphony for your diverse audience is equivalent to customizing your email frequency. Sort clients according to their participation, hobbies, and demographics. Increase the number of emails you send to recent and active customers, and only occasionally contact inactive or unsubscribed customers. By doing this, your email marketing experience becomes harmonic and resonates with the unique needs of every customer category.

Testing and measuring is always extremely important, however measure the reactions to the content as well as the frequency. Content is king.

Unfortunately, there's no one answer that will work for everyone, though there are a few factors to consider here: - Is it a new customer (who may need more frequent emails to learn features about your product), or an old loyalist who's an expert already? - Would your customers want to be notified of every new feature release, or can a monthly/quarterly round-up suffice? Some important considerations: - Set expectations beforehand (tell them what to expect when they submit their email to you) - A/B test if needed to find the sweet spot that works for you - Ask customers for their preference, or better, give them the choice to decide the frequency.

Find a tailored frequency for emails based on your audiences’s appetite. Testing and measuring is essential. Check your audience’s pulse by taking note of the content, Open Rates, CTR, Engagement rate, Unsubscribes, Bounces, etc. You may also A/B test for how the audience reacts to copy, design, etc. Or how well a day of the week works for emails, or time of the week, or your audience’s preferred device for viewing emails, etc. Also, cleaning your lists before sending emails is important as you may not want to send emails to unengaged accounts as that may affect your results. Segment the lists and create campaigns according to each audience’s goals and needs.

Testing and measuring marketing emails are crucial to see what works best. For instance, if an e-commerce business tests different subject lines, they can measure which one gets more people to open the emails. By analyzing results, businesses can learn and improve, ensuring their emails are more effective in grabbing attention and driving customer engagement. It's like trying different keys to find the one that unlocks the door to customer interest and action.

This is the only part of the article that provides any insight into what a marketer should do to determine frequency...basically trial and error...

Recently, I joined a marketing webinar from a top marketing agency, and while I enjoyed the insights given, but my pleasure soon turned into irritation by the daily emails i received, sometimes, twice in a day, I was keen to see why they thought daily emails would be the most effective way to keep contact so I stayed subscribed. However, I couldn't keep up with their daily emails and it just kept accumulating in my inbox that I had to unsubscribe. As a rule of thumb, daily emails are a NO for me. There is a thin line between marketing and spamming, you should always know when it seems you have crossed the line. Always use your email data to know the right email send frequency.

There is a very thin line between noise and marketing comms. Too many emails will become noise eventually. As per my experience 1 newsletter type email once a month for outbound marketing is just right. However this frequency can and should change based on the industry and customer personas. Using tools to understand what is working well for the outbound comms can give fair idea of how much and what to fine tune. Respecting preferences, seeking permission, and offering customization options demonstrate a commitment to delivering value. The emphasis on clear communication, mobile optimization, and avoiding spam triggers aligns with creating engaging and non-intrusive email campaigns.

Always ensure that you are solving a problem for consumers in an eDM. It's about them not you. Problems could be they don't understand something (so you educate them), they are confused (so you inspire them), they are bored (so you entertain them) etc.

Customer is the King! Always remember that! Would you overwhelm/irritate a king? No right? Then why would you do that with your customers by sending them too many emails? Listen I get it, everyone wants to earn the quick buck/grow your customer base, but NEVER do so at the cost of spamming your customer. Email marketing is the hen that lays the golden egg yeah? Remember do not push the hen too much, it would stop producing the egg! So how to go about email marketing you ask? Here is how: 1) ALWAYS ask for customer permission before adding them to the list. 2) Prefer clarity and conciseness. 3) Avoid spammy words/phrases 4) Find the right balance frequency and quality. Remember Goldilocks and the 3 bears? Yeah exactly, find the balance.

Respecting your customers is essential for email marketing. Strike the correct balance; avoid being overly or underly dramatic. Give importance to convenience, relevance, and value. Request consent, allow recipients to select how frequently you send emails, utilize clear content, and optimize for mobile. Steer clear of spam triggers. Achieve the ideal mix between number and quality to create campaigns that have an impact and connect with your target.

Like everything in life, you should send the right amount with the right frequency. What that means? Send all you want if all of them are RELEVANT, EXPECTED and WORTHY to be read. It is definitely not about quantity it all about quality. The real question is, how much your company have to say?

Not everything is a campaign- just because your e-Mail program tells you so. Don’t let MailChimp and ConstantContact tell you what and how often you should mail your target audience. (Remember: their ONLY solution is to email) They will tell you that an industry benchmark may be a 20% OR or a 7% CTR. This is nonsense and the opposite of respecting your audience. Because it means that for 80% of your audience your mails are clutter/ spam- not even worth to have a look at it and that for 93% your content is irrelevant to even engage with a single mouse click. Accepting these abysmally low rates as a given and continuing to annoy your distribution list is the opposite of respectful.

For a long time we’ve heard that emails are dead, but for B2B it remains a cornerstone of marketing. But we need to to still innovate, and it’s the ideal to drive customer engagement on their terms (as it’s less intrusive). So personal emails from senior leadership, or a way to invite feedback that’s less demanding than a public review site, along with a more granular way to control frequency/type than we usually get offered.

Each of the 4 aspects listed is key, but an additional critical piece is setting your audience's expectations, which can start as soon as they sign up or register for your communications. What does the profile center look like for them? Are they able to customize what they want, when they want it, and how they want it delivered? It can be difficult not to get too granular, but the more tailored the message, the higher the likelihood of the expected response.

In addition to all the 4 points above, it is imperative to focus your efforts toward the kind of content you are creating, especially if you are in the B2B space. The reason? B2B isn't the easiest, which is probably why the content tends to get boring some times. If you're able to come up with a way to make this simple and interesting, you've won half the battle. Emails are flooding all our inboxes all the, but if your's makes someone laugh a little, it guarantees a tiny space in their memory.