One of the most common questions people ask me about email marketing is, “How often should I email my subscribers?”
Well, for that there is definitely no one-size fits-all answer. Some publications are suitable for daily email, some will do well several times per week, once per week or even once per month. But in all honesty, I wouldn’t recommend once per month as you’re probably losing your marketing oomph. We already talked about it, but if you’re doing a longer publication (and that may be one reason why you email less frequently), you’re not keeping your reader focused on your message because your sending too many messages at once. As a general guideline, you can often get away with shorter, but more frequent emails and you’re likely to boost your response. Test it out and see.
And even though I said there is no one-size fits-all answer, I do have some recommendations:
Write with some regularity: Now I’ve never been one to say you must email on a precise schedule as is common advice in email marketing. Sure, you can keep your schedule rigid if you want, but it can just add unnecessary stress. If you don’t have time to email on a particular day, don’t lose sleep over it. Send it the next day or when you can.
Note which days your readers seem more responsive: Your readers may be more responsive on some days than others. Do a little testing to see when they are more likely to open and act on your emails.
I have recently changed to daily email, and I do tend to email on certain days. I also give my readers a heads up when an important/useful email will be coming their way. This really helps me keep a conversational tone to my emails. I do what I can to mimic the way a friend would email a friend and friend’s don’t always email on a certain day. They email when they have something to say and may indicate when they’ll email next time, but they rarely follow a rigid schedule.
I have had good success with weekend email blasts. although this seems counter intuitive. Inbox’s are less stuffed and your prospect is more relaxed, hopefully, so that a well thought out subject line has a better chance of gaining their attention.
As always, but even more so on weekends, make sure your email has something of value
Dave
I agree, Vera, that’s very good advice. It’s a useful strategy to do email marketing when there is some important news to announce, or something interesting to say, rather than doing it at regular intervals.
I mail out every Wednesday at 11 am. What I am going for is consistency. I want my audience to KNOW that every week they will be getting Ed Roach’s Weekly Tips at exactly the same time. After a time this becomes as common knowledge as sunset.
I used to have a similar approach as Ed – fixed weekday and fixed time. Now I read somewhere that sending out on sunday afternoon 3:30 pm returns the highest opening rates (results were based on a study using a few thousand email addresses).
A possible reason for this is (when you want to reach consumers) that families do lots of email/computer stuff on weekends and many ebay auctions are ending sunday afternoons or evenings (so everone is checking ebay or their email).
My audience is small to medium businesses. So I’m not sure Sunday would be a good fit, BUT to be open minded my blog has decent Sunday readership so maybe it would be worth a test. Couldn’t hurt.
Tough to peg the right frequency, but if your blasts are consistently relevant to the recipients, I’d guess the send time/date is less important.
I have a few sites that that send out emails… Most send messages when something changes. For example, if someone writes a comment on their profile page. Other than that I send out emails only when there is a major change to my system.
Ed, an other approach would be to send at around the same day&time the person originally subscribed. Could be used as an indicator for being interested and working on topic at this point of time.
Small businesses do a lot of office stuff on weekends. Just think of someone running his shop Monday to Saturday, not much time in the evening to do bookkeeping and other office tasks. A sunday could work out well for you.
Btw, wanted to send out my current newsletter on sunday 28 and and this morning i found that i have scheduled it for running this morning 11 a.m. (can’t change it anymore).
I firmly believe no matter what schedule you follow, consistency breeds familiarity and that spurs growth in business.
When doing e-mail marketing campaigns it is important to be mindful of your reader. Too many e-mails in a short space of time can result in “e-mail fatigue”. My suggestion is to include interesting content in your e-mail campaigns i.e. it should be more than just a sales letter. If it captures your readers interest – regular e-mails will be more welcome.
I think this is very dependant on the industry, take the personal insurance industry, with little change that is of any value to the consumer pushing out mail outs a couple of times a week just seems like overkill. I ask myself before pushing out a new email marketing piece is this going to be of value to the reader, if the answer is no I scrap it until I have enough useful information to make interesting reading.
I can see how daily mail outs can have great impact in certain circumstances. I receive a daily tip on nutrition from a small company in the UK and it keeps me aware of their brand and going back to their site.
One of the hot topics in internet marketing right now is creating lists because they are a much longer term strategy then just setting up a ppc campaign or something. One thing I have noticed that a lot of people stress with your list is not to over email them, or you could risk loosing subscribers. I think this is true for small businesses also. I know I have actually unsubscribed from certain online retailers before because they just send too many updates. Even though they are sending coupons and deal updates sometimes it just gets to be too much. I think you are right though about NOT once per month, that is definitely not enough, but sometimes multiple times per week can be annoying.