Finding the right email frequency is crucial to keep your subscribers engaged. Email them too little, and they may forget about you. Email them too often, and they might get annoyed and leave your list. Marketing Sherpa found that getting too many emails from a brand is the top reason people unsubscribe.
But what is the best email marketing frequency? Is it once per month? Once per week? How frequently should you send an email to keep your list interested in your brand?
In this post, we’ll dive into those questions and hand you some email frequency best practices to follow for your ecommerce business.
What is the best frequency for email marketing?
Email frequency trends
Email marketing constantly evolves. A few years ago, it would have been odd to see GIFs in emails and recently, they’ve become all the rage. It’s no different for email frequency, except that looking at general email marketing trends holds the risk of missing what’s going on in your particular industry.
When we compare data for 2020 with data for 2019, for example, we see that within the apparel industry, email frequency has gone up more than 4% for luxury apparel, more than 4% for fashion apparel, and more than 9% for activewear
Within the Travel & Tourism industry, however, email frequency has dropped close to 20% in 2020 in comparison to 2019. This isn’t really surprising giving the pandemic, but when creating general reports on email frequency, these numbers can drastically alter the averages.
With a paid MailCharts account, you can look up average sending behavior across industries and get data just like this.
Email frequency by industry
But how do you stay in the know about common practices within your industry without having to rely on once-a-year third-party reports? That’s where MailCharts comes in.
We track thousands of brands across a variety of ecommerce industries and break them down into specific industry groups. That way, you always get an up-to-date view of the email marketing customs within your niche.
Select the industry groups your brand belongs to and get an instant overview of the average email marketing frequency across that category alongside data on subject lines, promotion rate, and more.
Want to know how often on average other brands within your industry are emailing? Sign up for a free MailCharts account today and find out.
With a paid account, you can dig even deeper and get detailed data on email frequency trends over longer periods of time, the most popular send days, and the most popular send times.
Aside from your larger industry, the way you position your brand will also affect your email frequency. Luxury brands that tempt customers with exclusivity won’t send out weekly promotions while a low-budget fashion brand might.
Additionally, ecommerce brands that cater to (mostly) business buyers tend to email less as well. In their case, a high email frequency may come across as unprofessional and they wouldn’t want their promotional emails to draw attention away from the actual conversations they’re having with their customers and prospects.
Because there are so many factors at play, the best thing to keep an eye on is how often your competitors are emailing. After all, they’re going after the same audience as you are.
How to track competitor email marketing frequency
Studying the email marketing frequency of your direct competitors is a great way to get an idea of the email frequency that works for your target audience.
When you notice they haven’t changed their email frequency in a long time, it’s probably because that frequency is working for them. With a MailCharts account, you can look up the sending behavior of specific competitors and compare their email frequency with yours. Compare the email sending frequency of up to 5 brands with MailCharts
Want to give us a try first? With a free account, you can see the number of emails per week a brand has sent on average in the last 90 days versus in the 90 days before that.
Studying how often your competitors send email is just one of the email frequency best practices to follow when finetuning your own email frequency. Here are the others:
Email frequency best practices
You’ve probably understood by now that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to email frequency.
Even within ecommerce, the ideal email marketing frequency can differ highly between one brand and another and depends on a variety of factors, such as the target audience, the type of products on offer, time of the year, and the types of emails you’re sending.
However, there are a few email frequency best practices that hold true across all industries. Following these will help you finetune your sending process and lower the risk of unsubscribes.
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1. Be clear about your goals
Before you worry about how often to email your subscribers, you should determine the goal of each of your email marketing campaigns. Depending on whether you’re preparing a general newsletter, a promotional holiday campaign, or a post-purchase review sequence, your goal will be different.
It could be to
- generate as many sales as possible in a short time span
- increase engagement and subscriber retention
- get new product reviews
or something else still.
Whatever your goal is, remember that email frequency is just one of many factors you need to get right to achieve the best possible result.
2. Tell new subscribers what to expect
A good way to prevent unsubscribes is to let people know how often they can expect to hear from you. If you send new customers an email every day the first seven days after they’ve signed up without telling them you’ll only email once per week after that, they might unsubscribe before they reach the end of those seven days.
Similarly, if you plan to email just once per month, you can add a note about how you respect their time and only want to get in touch when you have something of value to send.
3. Let recipients control the email frequency
Even better than simply stating how often you’ll email your subscribers, is letting them control the email frequency. To do that, you need an email preferences page where each subscriber can indicate how often they want to hear from you as well as a link to that page in each email you send.
If you decide to go this route, make sure to adapt your email copy based on the number of emails per week, per month, or even per day someone signed up for. You don’t want to send a 48-hour weekend sale to someone who’ll only get your email the Tuesday after the sale has already ended.
4. Segment your list
If you email your list twice per week and 85% of your list engages with your emails at least once per month, you have quite an engaged audience. They may not be reading every email, but they’re reading your emails regularly.
If, on the other hand, only 10% of your list reads every email and the other 90% doesn’t read any of your emails, you have a problem. You’ll probably want to put that 10% in a separate segment of highly engaged subscribers and figure out why the remaining 90% isn’t opening your emails.
It may be because you’re emailing them too often, but it could also be that your email subject lines simply don’t interest them. Whatever the reason, you’ll want to decrease email frequency for this segment until you find a way to re-engage them.
Another way to segment your list for email frequency purposes is based on customer buying behavior. Loyal fans of your brand will want to get regular updates but that’s probably not the case for someone who bought from you once because they needed a gift for one of your loyal fans. That “casual buyer” may only want to hear from you around typical gifting holidays.
5. Don’t ignore email timing
Figuring out how often to send email marketing is one thing. In addition to that, you also want to run tests to find the perfect email cadence for each of your campaigns. Email cadence is the combination of email frequency (how often you email) and strategic send times (when you email).
If you run an e-shop for sunglasses and have found that one email per month is the best email frequency to send out general promotions, you may find that these promotions do better on Monday morning, when your subscribers have just spent the weekend outside wearing their old sunglasses, than on Friday afternoon, when they’ve been in the office for an entire week and can barely remember what sunlight feels like.
Additionally, you can personalize send times to increase your open and click rates even more.
Say you’ve figured out that the best frequency to email your audience is once per week, but you notice that some recipients open your email instantly and others only after a few days. Then you realize that the quick openers are all on the US East Coast and opening your email as it lands in their inbox on Friday afternoon, while they’re still at work, while the slow openers are on the US West Coast and don’t see it until they get back to the office on Monday morning.
Similarly, your audience may consist of morning readers and evening readers, or weekday openers and weekend openers. If you adapt your send times to their personal reading habits, you’ll likely see a lift in engagement.
Sign up for one of our paid plans and get access to average email frequency and send times for thousands of ecommerce brands across a variety of industries.
6. Automate your email frequency
You’re probably already building automated drip campaigns, setting up triggers for your transactional emails, and scheduling your newsletters but this best practice is too important not to mention. If you try to send out emails manually, you’re bound to make mistakes. You may mix up the send times of two segments or forget to send an email altogether.
Map out your campaigns well in advance so you have time not just to create all the emails, but also to automate them and to double-check your automation setup.
7. Consider the totality of emails you send
Your marketing emails aren’t sent in a vacuum. The person on the receiving end is also getting order confirmations, event invitations, and who knows what else from you. You don’t want to send them so many emails that they get overwhelmed and just unsubscribe for everything.
Alternatively, they might choose to unsubscribe from promotional emails to make sure they spot all of your other emails in their inbox. You won’t have lost them entirely if they do this, but you’ll have lost a way to sell to them.
8. Track your deliverability rates
A high percentage of unsubscribers, low open and engagement rates, as well as recipients marking your emails as spam, aren’t just signs that you may need to adapt your email frequency. These things will also affect your deliverability and have email providers send your emails to the promotions tab or, worse, straight into the spam folder.
A note on surveys
“Ask them” is an often-used phrase in email marketing and while it may be a great idea to survey your customers about the latest product they bought from you, how they perceive your brand, and which type of product they’d like to see you produce next, surveys are less ideal to help you determine your email frequency.
The reason?
People might not always distinguish between your marketing emails, your transactional emails, your event invites, and your general newsletter. All they see are emails from your brand. That means that their opinion on whether they receive too many promotional emails from you might be unreliable.
Data, on the other hand, doesn’t lie. If your subscribers are unhappy with how often you’re emailing them or what you’re emailing them, it’ll show in your engagement and unsubscribe rates.
Start optimizing your email marketing frequency today
Finding the right email marketing frequency for different segments of your list is essential to prevent unsubscribes, increase engagement, and safeguard your email deliverability rates. Use the tips and email frequency best practices in this article to check how you can improve the current send frequency of your campaigns and to give new email marketing campaigns the highest chance of success.
Lastly, make sure to keep an eye on what other brands within your industry are doing to spot trends and gain inspiration for A/B tests.
Sign up for a free MailCharts account and learn what the average email frequency is for your industry.
