Adventures in Email Marketing

This is a series of basic questions, and tips, for email marketing.
Question: How frequently can, or should, I email?

Answer: The quick response is once a week. Very few of your customers will get upset if you email them once a week. Some folks use 1 every 5 business days, as a rule of thumb.

The longer answer depends on what kind of content you have in your email. Some email, such as daily stock alerts, can be sent every day. If your customer selects subscription with some kind of tip to frequency- “bi-monthly newsletter,” for example. Otherwise, if it’s regular promotional email “white sale,” etc. then you really should just send it once a week.

This frequency control is why more and more marketers are moving towards lifecycle, triggered, event email. That means the schedule isn’t dependent on you, the marketer, but on the user’s interaction with your site or products. Recipients don’t mind an email if it is super relevant to their communication with you.

A quick word about metrics: a way to find out the perfect frequency for your email is to do the following reporting work:
Determine the cost of acquiring email.
Determine the lifetime value of the average recipient on your site.
Watch and monitor the number of unsubscriptions per campaign, and the number of received emails per average user.

Balancing the ratio of acquisitions to unsubscriptions, along with the value of an email (the lifetime spend) enables you to carefully moderate the frequency with which you send emails. Once you lose a subscriber, it is very hard to get them back.