Autoresponder systems make it simple to advertise by email.  You can create as many custom messages aimed at your target markets as you like and send them out as frequently as you can manage.  But should you?  How much is too much?  At what point do you risk alienating your customers and watching your open rates plunge, while your unsubscribe rates rise?

These are tough questions, and they point out one of the chief differences between email marketing and your other online business activities.  When building a website or using your keyword marketing tool to increase SEO, more is always better.

More functionality and interactivity on your website.  More SEO for higher search engine rankings.  More partners in affiliate marketing for more new sales leads and opt-ins for your mailing lists.  More, more, more!  More is good, and cheap web hosts give you everything you need to get all this done.

Your mind-set for email marketing needs to be a little different, though.  Bombarding your customers with too many emails in rapid succession, and you may run the risk of being annoying, or, worse, reported as a spammer.

An email from your business should be a welcome break from the daily routine and a chance to click through to your website for a little window shopping before heading back to the daily grind.  You don’t want your customers’ reactions to, instead, be along the lines of, “oh no, not them again!”

It would be great if there were a hard and fast rule, backed up by years of research, that told you just how many emails per day you could send.  Unfortunately, that’s not the case.  There are too many differences in the various markets that online entrepreneurs like you are working with to come up with a magic number for email frequency.

And coming up with a magic number is probably the wrong way to look at the question, anyway.  Instead, you should consider the content of your messages, instead.  In other words, instead of looking at email messages in terms of a quota that must be filled

Instead, think about quality instead of quantity.  Don’t send your customers an email message for the sake of meeting your weekly quota of mailings.  Instead, send your customers an email whenever you’ve got something worthwhile to tell them.

Clearance sales, seasonal items, new product lines—there’s a lot of material for you to work with.  Keeping in mind that an email marketing message should be narrowly focused on a specific selling point, you should have no shortage of reasons to contact your clientele.

From this point of view, the answer to the question, “how often should I email my list?” is easy: “whenever you have something worthwhile to tell them.”  Your customers are unlikely to be counting how many times per day or per week you’re emailing them if they find something delightful whenever they do open your emails.

And as you monitor the performance of your email marketing campaigns over time, studying the open rates, the click through rates, the unsubscribe rates, and so on, you can be sure that the ups and downs are most likely in response to the content of your messages, not to their frequency.  If you’re only sending out messages when you’ve got something good to say, you’re frequency is just right.

  • Share/Bookmark