Email Marketing: How Much Contact is Too Much Contact?

When you’re planning an email marketing campaign, there are many things to keep in mind. You’ll want to come up with creative copy, eye-catching designs, and make sure your campaigns are relevant and interesting enough to keep your subscribers engaged.

However, your campaign creative isn’t the only important component of your email marketing strategy. Compelling creative can help you capture your audience’s attention, but being strategic with the timing and frequency of your emails can amplify your results.

How Often is Too Often?

Determining how often to stay in touch with your email subscribers can be tricky. Through more frequent contact, you can keep them up to date about the latest news and promotions, and keep them engaged with your business. In fact, sending emails too infrequently can result in your messages going unnoticed and unopened, leading to missed opportunities to nurture a relationship with your audience.

While regular communication with your subscriber list can help you maintain relationships and drive repeat business, getting too carried away with updates can have negative consequences. Flooding your subscribers’ inboxes with constant updates may cause them to unsubscribe, so it’s very important to find the right balance.

Optimizing Email Frequency for Your Business.

When it comes to determining the right email frequency for your business, there is no one correct answer. However, there are a few simple ways to find the right approach:

• Use a calendar to plan ahead. Setting up a calendar for your email campaigns will make it easier for you to plan ahead, and ensure that you are sharing timely and relevant content with your subscribers. You may also want to vary your frequency based on time of year. For example, if you provide professional landscaping services, you may want to increase your frequency during warmer months, and then scale back during the colder winter months.
• Learn from your competition. Another great way to decide how often to send emails is to learn from peers and competitors within your industry. Find a few companies similar to yours and see how often they are emailing their subscribers, and what types of emails they are sending.
• Test out different strategies. To really refine your content and frequency, you’ll need to do a little bit of testing. Through segmentation, you can split up your email list and better tailor your email content. Here are just a few ways you can use segmentation to experiment with email frequency:
  • Focus on highly-engaged subscribers. Using data from your previous email campaigns, you can identify users who frequently engage with your email content. Try sending more frequent emails to these highly-engaged subscribers.
  • Reconnect with subscribers who aren’t engaging. For subscribers who aren’t taking action, you can use your data to determine what types of content might recapture their attention. Try emailing these subscribers less often, and experiment with content that they may find more engaging.
  • Let your subscribers choose their frequency. If you send out several updates a month, you can let new subscribers choose which updates they would like to receive. For example, some subscribers may only want to receive updates about current offers and promotions, while others may also like to read your monthly newsletter.
• Monitor key metrics. As you start experimenting with your email strategy, make sure you are continually monitoring the performance of each campaign. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes can help you determine whether your experiment was successful, or if it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to email frequency, it’s easy to experiment and find the strategy that works best for your business. For more tips on how to create a more effective email marketing strategy for your business, contact our team for your free Digital Marketing Plan.