Email marketing is a great tool for reaching your customers, clients, fans, or supporters. Not only do you have full control of the message being sent, but by cultivating a list of email subscribers, you have a direct line of access into the inboxes of people who have shown active interest in your brand and opted to receive communication from you. Yet with this power comes great responsibility: if you send email marketing campaigns so frequently that your subscribers feel bombarded, they’ll likely opt out; and if you email so infrequently, they’ll forget that you even existed.
What Does Your Sending Frequency Depend On?
In part one of this blog, we started to unpack what factors determine how often you should send email marketing campaigns. As a refresher, our first two factors were: the expectations you set upon sign-up and what you’ve done with past campaigns. Your sending frequency should also depend on who your email audience is and what your marketing goals are.
Who Your Audience Is & What Your Goals Are
As with everything marketing-related, it’s critical to know upfront who your audience is and what your specific goals are with these campaigns. Without these two vital pieces of information, your email marketing strategy is ultimately nonexistent—there is no direction or parameters of success. Who are the people on your list? Why did they sign up? Do their needs and interests vary? These are some questions you can ask yourself to get a better understanding of your audience as well as what content and at what frequency will work best for them.
As for being clear about your goals, ask yourself why you’re sending these emails and what you hope to get out of them. If your restaurant is trying to fill up tables and get more reservations, maybe you need to be emailing weekly to share the new specials and announce any live entertainment. If your business is seasonal—let’s take a nursery, for example—maybe you email monthly during the fall and winter to stay in touch but then send emails every other week during the spring and summer seasons to move inventory/increase sales.
Our Tips for Email Frequency
- Be Consistent – Determine a schedule and stick to it. When you’re consistent, your readers come to depend on (and maybe even look forward to!) receiving your mailing.
- Send at Least Once a Month – If we HAD to give a rule of thumb for how often to send email marketing campaigns, we would advise a once-monthly minimum. Anything less frequently than that runs the risk of losing touch with your customers and being forgotten.
- Keep Your List Organized and Updated – Your email subscriber list needs to be maintained. You can organize your customers with certain tags, break your audience into segments, and clean or archive contacts who aren’t opening your emails.
- Evaluate Email Analytics and Reports – Information is power. Don’t neglect regularly looking through your email reporting, as it can be valuable in identifying trends and problem areas.
- Don’t Over Promise and Under Deliver – When setting a sending schedule, remember that it needs to be something that works for you and your team, too—not just your audience. Don’t commit to emailing twice weekly if you or your marketing staff won’t realistically have the time to do so.
Finding the right email frequency can result in higher open rates, fewer unsubscribes, and more opportunities to do business and connect with customers through email marketing. Need help making your emails successful? As a full-service marketing agency, we can completely take over your email marketing; you won’t have to worry about content creation, automation or list segmentation, send frequency, or performance analytics. Contact Vision today to inquire about this and our other services.
Plus, if you want to see how we conduct email marketing for our own agency, you can sign up for our monthly e-newsletter!
