There have been a lot of studies about email marketing and most of them focus on one key question: how often should you send out emails for marketing? Not surprisingly, just about every single one of these email marketing studies shows different results – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly… There is one thing that the
email marketing studies do concur about though: if you send out too many emails, your subscribers will opt out. In one study, 73% of opt in subscribers choose to opt out because of “too many emails.”
First off, let’s be very clear: there is no magic number of emails which suddenly becomes “too much.” Some email marketing campaigns send out multiple emails every day and still keep their subscribers from opting out. In order to figure out how many emails you should send out, you will need to do random sample tests by sending out different amounts of emails to various groups and seeing which number gets you the best results without causing subscribers to opt out. This sort of sampling is really difficult for small businesses though because you need at least a couple thousand subscribers to your email marketing list before you can see results. There are some great analytic tools which can help you out though – even if you only have a 100 subscribers. Service providers like AWeber have some cool tools to help you determine which email marketing frequency is working best for you.
In the absence of one set model which works best for everyone, here are some tips for determining email marketing frequency.
Pretend that it isn’t free
Since email marketing is basically free, it is easy to get overzealous and send out way too many emails. Instead, pretend that you have to pay for you email marketing campaign like it was being sent by post. A decent post mailing campaign will cost at least 30 cents per recipient. So, you would obviously expect more than a 30 cent per person return on your investment. While the same parameters for mail and email marketing don’t apply exactly, it can help put your email marketing frequency in perspective when you think about it as a non-free marketing tactic.
Send Emails Before Your Leads Will Act Again
In most cases, your leads are only going to perform what you ask of them a set amount of times yearly – regardless of how often you market to them. For example, if you are running a clothing store online, your customers are probably not going to buy again every week. Instead, you should analyze when they are likely to make purchases and send out your email marketing campaign before they act – like sending out special discount coupons before the new season and before holidays.
Even with email marketing, content is still king. If you don’t have fresh, new, exciting content for your email marketing campaign, then don’t bother sending out a new email to your subscribers. If they get boring, irrelevant emails (even if infrequently), they are going to opt out very quickly.