How Many Marketing Emails Are Too Many?

Email is a hugely effective tool that you can use to boost your business’ marketing efforts, provided you use them correctly. If misused, however, email marketing can be less beneficial (or worse, actively harmful) to your business’ self-promotion.

Let’s determine how to balance between overdoing your email marketing and neglecting your contacts so that you can get the most value out of your efforts.

Unfortunately, There’s No “Ideal” Number for Email Frequency

As lovely as it would be to say, “Email your contacts x times a month,” and give you a concrete number for x, that isn’t how this works. Too many variables are involved, such as…

• The industry you operate in
• The services you offer
• The preferences of your target audience
• The message you’re sharing

That said, most businesses measured by various surveys responded best to about one email per week. Some A/B testing and some focus on your email marketing platform's metrics can help you determine your ideal rate for sending messages to your contacts.

Let’s dive into some factors you’ll need to pay attention to.

What to Look For When Deciding How Often to Send Emails

Why send messages to someone who isn’t going to open them?
If a contact (let’s call them Taylor) repeatedly ignores your communications, you should strongly consider sending Taylor fewer messages overall. There are a few reasons for this.

First, there’s the greymail phenomenon. Greymail is the term for legitimate emails sent with the recipient's permission only to rot in their inbox, unopened and ignored. While this won’t inherently hurt your delivery rates, it will significantly impact your engagement levels as your audience gets used to ignoring your messages. Taylor already has plenty of emails to sort through… do you expect them to have the patience to deal with another offering the same thing for the fourth time this week?

Then, if Taylor really loses their patience, they could unsubscribe from your email lists, leaving you with one less contact (and all the business opportunities they’d have brought). This is bad, as it means all your efforts to that point have been wasted, so this should be avoided.

As a result, you should pay attention to your email metrics and act accordingly. Things like your open rates and engagement levels will tell you how receptive Taylor and the rest of your recipients are to your messaging in its current state.

Why send messages to someone who won’t see any value in them?
Let’s pretend for a moment that you are in the business of producing and distributing gizmos. All the marketing in the world, even the most well-written and persuasive emails, won’t convince Taylor to purchase your gizmos if they require and are seeking out doodads. Taylor just isn’t the right audience for you.

You might create these doodads and gizmos, but Taylor won’t know if they are only given information about gizmos. Maybe you send out materials about your doodads, but they get buried amongst all the marketing about your gizmos.

This is why it pays to segment your email lists, dividing them up into collections so that different recipients receive different messages based on what they’ve previously expressed interest in. That way, you won’t risk over-communicating and frustrating everyone else on your list, while still being able to send out all the marketing emails you want.

On a broader scale, make sure that every email you send offers something—an insight, a deal, or an invitation—that provides value to the reader. If Taylor is going to put in the time to read your messages, these messages need to deliver something in return.

Why send messages to someone if you aren’t going to be reliable?
Related to our last consideration, you need to be sure you can commit to emailing consistently in terms of quality and quantity. Like any marketing effort, email marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Establishing a predictable schedule will help you in a few ways. First, it helps you cultivate an impression of reliability. Provided you’re delivering the aforementioned value that your emails need to remain engaging, your audience will gradually learn to anticipate a message coming from you at that time. This means that—on some level—your contacts will think about your business more often and will be more likely to think of you first when they need what you have to offer. 

You want Taylor’s mind to jump to your company when they realize they need a gizmo or doodad, not for them to wonder what their options are. This is more likely to happen if Taylor regularly sees your marketing messages. 

On the administrative side, a schedule also makes it easier to manage the production of these emails. Establishing that you must regularly send an email at a specific interval makes it easier to assign the resources needed to ensure the email is written on time… ensuring that your audience's impression of your reliability is accurate.

Impress (Don’t Alienate) With Your Email Marketing

Again, this isn’t an exact science, so different patterns may be more effective when communicating with your particular audience or audience segments. Generally speaking, however, about one to two email messages a week seems to be a healthy number… just as long as your audience is receptive to them, gets something out of them, and knows when to expect them. The key is experimenting until you determine what works for you, regularly reviewing and adjusting your strategy as things change.

We’re in the business of helping businesses around the world promote their services to their audiences through a variety of campaigns and initiatives, many of which include email. Find out more about what we can do for your company by calling us at 607.433.2200 today.