Once, twice, regularly? How to get results without annoying your recipients

    by Ira Byvalkevich
    30.04.2021
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    Email frequency has a significant impact on customer engagement and a company's revenue. Subscribers react to changes in mailing frequency in different ways. If you need to know in what ways and how many email sent per day are great to boost your marketing results, this article is a key.


     

    How many email sent per month are an optimal choice?


    It’s common that too many email may kill your email marketing performance. To avoid poor quality email communication with your customers, engagement decrease and other issues, it’s better to discover the top emailing cases and the best marketing frequency for customer emails.


    Remember that it all depends on your subscribers and what you have to offer, but still, there are tendencies to consider & figure out how often to send email marketing with the maximum profit in our individual case.


    Research shows that it’s effective to stick to a medium frequency for the mail send out to achieve open rate success:


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    Here, statistics reveals that emails sent multiple times per week have fewer open ups as compared to the emails sent monthly. Such figures also tell us that the top open rates cannot possibly be tied to email frequency only.


    Also, if you send mailings 4 or 5 times a month, then you can send them much more often and this will not increase the number of unsubscribed. In fact, it will even become less. How curious! That’s why do businesses send emails in a certain tempo.


     

    How many email sent per day affect results


    Many digital marketers often question the daily frequency for the best email campaign. Let's look under scrutiny how the frequency of email campaigns affects the open rate and the number of clicks (CTR) of such emails. There are days in a month when you can't just skip mailings. For example:


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    Have a look, Tuesday and Thursday has the best level of engagement. They may lead to higher open rates. Wednesday is another good option, especially for business sector.


    On the other hand, some research in B2B, B2C, entertainment, financial services, tourism, insurance, real estate and technology may provide an alternative vision. They often assume that user engagement is higher on Fridays and conversion rates - on Saturdays. Seems strange, but still.


    So, how often to send marketing emails per day will only depend on your business specifics & your current marketing needs: if it’s an acquisition, or retention/ remarketing, etc. will vary your email cadence in 1-4 campaigns/per certain day of the week chosen on the basis of numerous factors.


     

    What are the newsletter frequency best practices?


    According to HubSpot statistics, 69% of American email users unsubscribe from mailings because they are sent too often. That's why it's best to keep your email frequency within one, two, or maximum three times a week!


    As you see, versions vary from one business to another, from one marketing research to another, etc. But don’t panic! There are practices on how often to send newsletter that are considered to be the best.


    Keep in mind a few things:


    • One email per week is a must. Otherwise, you’re like to miss out on sales opportunities and your email list will become disengaged. So, make it your starting point.
    • Sending one to two bulk emails per week will be an ideal option for the majority of sales cases, especially if you’re just starting out with email campaigns.
    • Sending an email every second day (or even more often) of the working week will drastically lower engagement levels without generating more sales as the recepients will think they’re superfluous.
    • Better to send emails late in the morning from 9:00 to 11:00. At this time, 45% of emails takes place, and the rates of openings and clicks on links are great for the marketing campaign. The logic is simple: people come to work and check their mail first.
    • Emails sent at 15:00 and 21:00 also receive good results.

    Use only high quality content with proper formatting & design and the top guidelines on how often should you send newsletters.


    • Besides, mind an ideal length for a subject line is 90 to 140 characters. At the same time, researchers notice that more and more users open emails from mobile devices, so there is a need for even shorter headers.
    • The best time to send emails is around 10 am, around 1 pm, and around 6 pm, but a lot depends on the industry and audience.

    According to GetResponse study, an open rate of 88.7% is admitted to be typical only for triggered mailings which is the highest open rate index. Confirmation emails and welcome emails that include links to download content are among them, which is the most useful targeted content.


    Three main keywords for the subject line are newsletter, PDF, e-book.


    • The average click-to-open rates for emails that contain the phrase "newsletter" in the subject line is 31.43%.
    • For the word "PDF" this figure is 30.31%,
    • And for "e-book" - 27.84%.

    Also, mind that your customers may react to changes in mailing frequency in different ways:


    • Mark emails as spam

    The overwhelming majority of respondents to the email frequency surveys chose the option get emails rarer which means that subscribers are still very worried about the frequency of their letters. They are annoyed with high frequency, and may dramatically lack when they get zero email per week (b2c, especially).

     

    A Pro Tip:


    Before you determine the perfect frequency of emails, make sure once again that you have prepared quality content, design, and the emails are personalized, so you may provide subscribers with what they really want and expect.


    Ask yourself the 2 most basic questions here: What value will the subscribers get after reading the email, and how can I make the content even more relevant for them even after extract email address from text?


    • Send complaints

    If you launch too frequent mailing of uninformative letters, then the rate of openings and click-through rates drop. Other indicators may also deteriorate.


     

    A Pro Tip:


    Provide tests. Test the frequency of sending letters and vary on a small segment of your subscribers in order to check campaign effectiveness.


    • Ignore or unsubscribe

    Sometimes it happens that you double the number of emails sent, but you do not achieve the expected result. This is because subscribers react to it in different ways. Mailings alone can increase your sales and engagement. But others, on the contrary, will reduce all indicators, and you will come to zero. To prevent this, let your subscribers choose how often they receive emails.


     

    A Pro Tip:


    An effective way to deal with ignored emails is segmentation. You can divide subscribers according to the received data. This segmentation allows you to send relevant content for each group.


    • Boost your sales

    This is what all marketers hope for. In reality, the odds will be lower, but things change with your next email campaign improvements.


     

    A Pro Tip:


    If you want to periodically increase your mailing frequency (for example, before Christmas or on business Wednesdays), then monitor the quality of the content. Subscribers will only be happy with the frequent newsletters if they are interested and have engaging design.


    Thus, great content is a must


    The quality of the content deserves a word. This factor has a very strong impact on the acceptable frequency of email campaigns. Never write just to remind your users of yourself. The content of your emails should primarily be useful to your subscriber base, otherwise they will be happy to unsubscribe from the mailing list and never be annoyed again.


    As you see, simply newsletter frequency best practices will not be enough to succeed. You should keep in mind all-in-one: content, design and the email tempo.


     

    How to deal with too many email?


    Of course, each case is unique. If you’d like to dig deeper into how often should i send out a newsletter and what’s the best variant for your business, you need to trace your marketing campaign results and form an individual data-driven scheme.


    A Case:


    It was HubSpot that published the results of their marketing with email experiments, confirming the opinion that it is not necessary to send mailings infrequently. They looked at how their CTR and bounce rate (unsubscribe) changed as they increased their monthly email frequency.


    It turned out that if you sent your subscribers 4 or 5 times a month, and then if you increased the number of monthly emails, there would be no sharp drop in clicks. Interesting, but still doubtful, isn’t it?


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    When HubSpot published their results of their email marketing experiments, they confirmed the opinion that it is not necessary to send mailings not regularly. But what about an ideal regularity? There are so many versions.


    There is a hypothesis that if you send mailings too often, then your recipients will unsubscribe more often. This is not always the case, because sometimes it is useful to remind your subscribers of yourself more than once a week.


    So, the fewer emails a company sends, the higher the engagement is. Averagely, the highest results are for campaigns in which users receive no more than 1 email per week. Such emails may have an average open rate of 33.4% and a click-through rate in relation to openings of 13.91%.


    Why? Because the more time has passed since the last moment the user subscribed to your newsletter, the less relevant and timely it may seem to him/her. If a user hasn't reminded you for a couple of months, and then your mailing list comes to him/her, then they might think that this is just another spam they hadn’t subscribed to and delete it without even opening it. Such misunderstandings are common for email marketing activities.


    Also, such rare emails will be less relevant and your subscriber list can be drastically reduced, which is very disliked by the popular mailing services for bulk business messaging. Need to make sure your email frequency isn't too high or too low? It is better to make it clear by choosing the optimal way for emails verification, automation of your email marketing data, and other marketing tasks with professional software for email marketers.


    For example, Atomic Software provides a full spectrum of marketing tools to automate & optimize your email marketing activities, so that to set them up with the right tempo and to the right audience segment.


    Atomic Mail Sender is a professional email creator, high-performance mass emailing software for your marketing campaigns, enables you to produce outstanding and attractive email campaigns. It has features for bulk email marketing campaigns, parsing or email extraction, etc.


    It enables you to manage the email via customization tools, personalized email templates, and so many other useful features are at your disposal to make it a real pleasure to work out your emails and measure progress without annoying your customers.


    To sum it up, of course, only a balanced and optimized decision for an everyday email in accord with your business needs and the marketing goals will provide you with a great answer to the most basic question: how to get results without annoying your email subscribers? Do not refuse using professional email tools to assist the email campaign processing.


     

    Conclusion


    The point is that there doesn’t exist a one-size-fits-all amount of emails that works 100%. So to create an effective email marketing strategy you need to start with regularity and then achieve your optimal email marketing frequency that perfectly fits your business and the current marketing needs.


    Schedule and send emails once a week, and then experiment by increasing and decreasing the frequency, but within reasonable limits ー do not nightmare your customers with emails! Good luck.


    Written by:
    Ira Byvalkevich
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