Learn how often you should send email newsletters to be effective.
There’s no magic number when it comes to how frequently a business should send out their email newsletter, so the short answer is, “it depends.” The most common variables that impact the frequency of email newsletters are listed below.
Time-Sensitive Content
One of the things that frequency is often based on is the kind of content you are looking to communicate to your subscribers. For example, if your business communicates time-sensitive information, or if your industry is in a constant state of flux where rules and regulations change and the information needs to be shared with customers immediately, then in that case, email should be sent out on a daily or weekly basis.
Subscriber Expectations
Another factor determining email frequency is the expectations you’ve set with your subscribers. A good email marketing best practice is that if you have a regular company newsletter or product newsletter that you want people to subscribe to, then it’s important to establish how frequently they can expect communication from you. Be very up front and provide that information when they sign up, and then stick with it.
If you decide to change the frequency, be sure to communicate that. If you slack and don't send your email newsletter to people as frequently as you promised, then people are likely to forget about you. If you send it too infrequently, they may even forget that they signed up for your newsletter.
The opposite side of that is, if you email them more frequently than what you had originally stated when they signed up, people will lose their trust in you. They won't see you as a credible news source or a credible business, because you're not holding up your end of the bargain. This will also annoy them and will likely result in spam complaints, higher opt-out rates or people not reading your content.
Resources
Another factor that impacts frequency is the resources you have available to create relevant content. What resources does your business have committed to content creation? How frequently can you honestly commit to producing, to writing that content?
Even if your customers expect a weekly newsletter from you, if you don’t deliver something that that is worth their while, they’ll stop reading. This is why it’s so important to include relevant content in your newsletters. If it's going to be more manageable from a resource perspective to produce something in house monthly, then that's the tactic you should approach, at least at first. Possibly consider increasing the frequency if you're able to keep up with that pace, or if you have the budget to hire an email marketing company. Either way, you should only send out a newsletter when you have something relevant to share, so that you keep your customers engaged and enjoying your newsletter.
As I touched on earlier, when it comes to email newsletter frequency, there are pitfalls to both extremes, so even once you’ve committed to a frequency, it’s important to test and analyze the results and get feedback in order to find the right cadence. Testing and analyzing the results you’re getting from your email marketing efforts will help you determine if you need to change your frequency, whether that be amping it up or scaling it back. Let us know if you want to continue discussing how often to send email marketing newsletters. We are happy to help.