Finding the right email frequency can be a delicate balance.
You know you need to be reaching out to the people on your email list regularly, but you also need to make sure that they aren’t feeling overwhelmed.
And of course, you have your own schedule to worry about. How much time can you invest into creating and sending emails each month?
While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to the question “How often should I email my customers?” there are steps you can take to determine a frequency that will work for you and your audience.
Let’s look at four steps you should follow:
If you’ve already been sending emails to your customers and supporters, you have plenty of information to help you decide on the right frequency for your business.
Consider the following questions:
Use the information you have available to create a benchmark for your business. Your open rates will let you know if people are looking forward to receiving your emails. Unsubscribes will indicate whether your messages are having the opposite effect.
While frequency won’t be the only factor that influences these metrics, these numbers do provide insight into how receptive your audience is to receiving your emails.
Looking at the past performance of your emails will help you determine what’s working and can also bring up any problem areas that exist. The next step is to put a schedule together that will help you reach your business goals.
Consider the following questions:
It’s important to have a regular scheduled mailing that readers can depend on. For most businesses, this will be an email newsletter with updates and relevant news from your organization.
But you’ll likely need to reach out to your audience with more timely messages to help you reach your goals.
A restaurant that wants to fill tables each week may need to communicate on a weekly basis to share information about specials and let customers know about any special events or entertainment.
A marketing consultant that wants to increase traffic to their website may have a weekly update, where they link people back to their company blog.
A service business that provides seasonal offerings — but wants to keep clients engaged throughout the year — may only send a monthly newsletter during the slower seasons and increase the frequency as they head into a busier time of the year.
Before you can make any final decisions, you’ll need to make sure you truly understand the people you’re trying to reach.
Consider the following questions:
While you may start off by making a decision about how often you reach out to your audience as a whole, the next step will be to identify the groups of people on your list and create a plan that’s specific to them.
You can learn a lot about your audience by looking at your email reports.
To take a deeper look into the makeup of your audience, consider sending an online survey to check in with your readers and learn more about what they’re interested in.
Ask them what they want from your business and even how often they’d like to hear from you. This can help you create a plan that’s tailored for them.
When you start to answer these important questions, you may have some concerns about the amount of time it will take to keep up with your email sending schedule.
If you’re a Constant Contact customer, there are a number of tools you can use to help make the most of your time. For regularly scheduled messages — like monthly newsletters or weekly updates — create a master email template to avoid having to start from scratch.
If you have a particular time or day that you dedicate to getting your marketing done, you can create your emails ahead of time and schedule them to send in advance.
For new subscribers or people who may need more information about your business, use a tool like Autoresponder to set up a series of automated emails that you can set up to send on their own.
As you experiment with different sending frequencies, make sure to track your results by monitoring your email reports.
Finding the right email frequency can result in higher opens, less unsubscribes, and more opportunities to do more business with email marketing.
Start out by looking at your email reports. They’ll let you know how your current email frequency is working for your business.
Have questions about how to choose the right email frequency for your business or organization? Let us know in the comments below.
There’s nothing we’d love more than to tell you a magic time and day that would give you the absolute best results for your email marketing campaign.
But while we can’t give you exactly that, we do have more than enough data and proven best practices to offer you something more satisfying than the generic ‘it depends’ answer.
The good news is we have compiled helpful resources and criteria to help you determine the best time and day to send emails for your specific business.
We have said it before and we’ll say it again: there isn’t an exact formula to building the perfect email. The same goes for when to send it. Businesses should look at email open times, as well as times of highest engagement through email and website, to understand the optimal time to schedule emails. The team at Salesforce conducted a study to reveal the best time to send a marketing email, finding that mornings and weekdays typically skew higher for open rates than evenings and weekends. And while that data is helpful, it’s probably not granular enough to progress your email marketing strategy on its own. Thus, you’re left with the exciting opportunity to experiment.
One of our own email marketing experts, Maria Halovanic, Director of Customer Lifecycle Management, had this to say: “If you aren’t using a platform that has intelligent sending time, you can refine your sending time through testing and understanding how your subscribers want to engage with you.” That means looking to open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes, and audience demographics to figure out the best send time, based on the type of content and subscriber.
To start, we’ll dive into everything you need to know about the factors that determine how your target audience is interacting with your emails.
When thinking about the best day or time to send an email, focus on your audience. Think about their routines and when your message has the best chance of reaching them when they have a moment to spare.
Pay attention to the following factors that might influence audience engagement:
Additionally, remember that a growing number of people are checking emails on their mobile device. Your audience doesn’t need to be sitting at home or at work in front of a computer to check their emails anymore. This means you’ll need to think differently about how you reach your audience with your email campaigns.
In addition to thinking about your audience, think about the timing around the content you’re sending them. For example, if your restaurant is running a limited-time special on appetizers, experiment with sending emails out the day before, or even sending last-minute reminders the day of the special. Some of your subscribers will jump at the opportunity when they receive an email, while others might be more likely to join you the next time they get a chance.
Perhaps you are trying to figure out the best time to send an email newsletter. The goal of your campaign is to provide your audience with helpful content on a regular basis. As you look at analytics, you might notice that subscribers tend to value consistency when receiving a regularly occurring email. Keeping your newsletter send time the same might work best to encourage opens because subscribers will know to look for your content in their inbox.
Tip: Show that your message is timely with your subject line. If you have an event coming up, add the date in the subject line to create a sense of urgency.
Testing is especially useful if you’re working with a large email list. Start by segmenting your list into two or three smaller groups and experiment with sending the same message out at different times.
Your test could be by time of day, like morning, afternoon or evening. Or you could try early in the week, mid-week, and weekend.
Keep everything else consistent so that the timing is the only thing that’s unique. Compare the open rates of each mailing, and you can get a clear picture of what’s working the best.
For many businesses, one of the most important aspects of timing will be to choose a time and stick with it. Ideally, you want your contacts to expect to hear from you and be on the lookout for your next message. Be consistent and avoid days and times that are known to be busy, for example holidays and standard meal times. You’ll also find that there are emails that your subscribers will expect to receive — like abandoned carts and birthday messages. Automating these types of email sends will help to instill trust and promote customer loyalty.
Tip: Add a short description including approximate sending times/frequency of emails to your sign-up forms.
To measure the effectiveness of your emails, you’ll want to pay attention to click-through rates (CTR). Your click-through rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link in your email and followed through to the next step. This could be a button with a call to action to register for an event or a product image that brings the subscriber to a product detail page on your website.
To measure the effectiveness of your email’s status in the inbox, pay attention to open rates. You want to be aware that as of September 2021, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection policy has rendered email open rates, for all intents and purposes, obsolete for marketers looking at open rates for subscribers using Apple products. While this may sound a little scary, remember that there are plenty of subscribers who check their email from a smartphone, laptop, or other device that isn’t an Apple product. Open rates from these subscribers will not indicate if your email was effective in helping you meet a particular goal, but they will help you understand whether subscribers are taking notice of your content in the inbox.
Industry trends are a great starting point when you’re first thinking about the best time to send a marketing email. At Constant Contact, we regularly analyze customer email results to collect industry-specific data to help you know where you stand. Our KnowledgeBase includes up-to-date information on the average open, click-through, and bounce rate trends by industry.
Tip: There’s a good chance you already have plenty of data about what works best for your audience within your email reports. While many factors influence email open rates, be sure to look for patterns that point to optimal times/days.
To make sure your emails are getting noticed in the inbox, test your subject lines to see what types of messages are attractive to subscribers. In order to run an A/B subject line test,, craft two subject lines for the same email. Then, select two subsections of your audience. Make sure the test groups are similar in size, as well as demographic/interest makeup. Select a time threshold to run your test, send your test messages, and wait for your results. Whichever subject line garners the most opens lets you know what type of content is resonating.
Here are some examples of subject line content to juxtapose:
Unlike many other marketing channels, email marketing works not only because you are sending messages to people who have asked to receive them, but you’re also sending those messages directly to a place most people visit every day — their inbox. To start on your quest to find the best time to send a marketing email, make sure you have access to the right data. The history of your previous sends has a lot to say about how your audience is interacting with your content. Constant Contact has your back in that department. Test out our email tracking software to see the insights you need to make informed decisions. Knowledge is power – so start sending.