How often should you send email campaigns?

Email marketing can play a huge role in growing your sales and leads through building long-term relationships, encouraging repeat business and keeping your brand front-of-mind. If you’re not sending email campaigns already, or?growing an email database, you could be missing out on sales and losing them to your competitors who are actively keeping in touch with their customers.

Although, as a marketing activity, email remains an effective and popular way to promote your products and services, for consumers, email marketing isn’t always well received. There are a number of reasons why recipients of emails don’t like them.

• Sometimes it’s down to the content. If you’re too salesy with your emails, that can be a huge turn off for many. If they’re not interested in what you have to offer, they’re going to lose interest, delete and unsubscribe, so ensuring your emails are targeted to the right audience with compelling content is vital to your email marketing success.
• They don’t know who you are. Maybe you purchased an email list or haven’t spoken to your customers in a long time. If you’re unfamiliar to your recipients, they may view your emails as spam.
• You send emails too often. No one likes being pestered, especially via email, so the frequency at which you send emails can play a role in how well they are received. Too frequent, and you’re likely to irritate your readers. Too infrequent and you’re likely to get the response “erm, who are you, again?”!

So, how often should you send email campaigns in order to keep your audience engaged, but without being a nuisance?

Daily?

Daily emails may be a bit excessive if you’re using email to sell, sell, sell. Imagine if the same sales person phoned you every day! We’d only recommend daily emails in a small number of situations. For example, daily emails may be appropriate if you’ve put together a daily email campaign where your recipients have actively signed up to received emails daily. A great example of this is Darren Hardy’s?Darren Daily?service where he emails a daily inspirational video to his database. The emails are short and to the point with just one key message each day. They’re easy to read as the content is usually in the form of a short video, so they don’t take up too much time. The content is predictable, so you know before you open it what it contains and that it’s something helpful and of value.

Weekly?

Weekly emails are a great way to keep in touch with your database on a regular basis. They’re particular good if you sell products that people buy often (like children’s clothing or office supplies). By sending this frequently, you can be sure your recipients will remember you when they’re due to make their next purchase.

However, weekly emails may be excessive if your customers only buy from you occasionally. For example, people tend to renew or shop around for their car insurance once a year and won’t really expect to hear from insurance companies every week. Whilst you may want to ramp up the communication closer to their renewal date, sending weekly emails 6 months away is more likely to irritate than influence!

Monthly?

Monthly email campaigns are a happy medium for most small businesses. Sending a monthly update to subscribers means you’re contacting them regularly, but without being over-the-top. If your resources are limited, curating content for a monthly email is much more doable than trying to come up with content every week.

Quarterly?

Quarterly emails are great for seasonal campaigns, or for sending emails with a lot of content. For example, lifestyle articles, features and stories can make a great online magazine which can be sent out to recipients as an email. The email contains a brief overview of the contents; each article and feature, with a link to read the full story on the website. As you’re not sending emails as frequently, you can create longer emails with more content to engage your readers.

Ad hoc?

Perhaps sending emails only when you have something to say is the best option? This makes sense, in principle, but in our experience it leads to emails never being sent or becoming so sporadic that they fail in building relationships with customers. Just like with personal relationships, they only grow and are maintained if you’re in regular contact. Otherwise they just drift and we don’t want our relationships with customers to do this as there’s always a competitor waiting to steal them away!

In answer to the question ‘how often should you send email campaigns?’, well, let’s just say it depends on a few things:

1. Your industry?and the products and services you sell?(how often do people buy them?).
2. Your customers?(do they enjoy consuming content via email? Are they bombarded with email already?).
3. What your recipients signed up for?(did you promise a daily, weekly or monthly email?)
4. Your resources?and your ability to produce regular, quality content.

Emails can become an annoyance for our recipients if we over-do it, but they also lose their effectiveness if we don’t send them regularly enough. It’s a case of getting the balance right and what is appropriate for your business.