Delivering emails to an inbox is arguably the most intimate form of online marketing because users have to take deliberate action to enable direct communication from a sender. This makes send times and cadence invaluable to gain favor with platform providers and establish trust with recipients. Further, because email marketing is mission critical in extracting customer lifetime value and the linchpin of any serious full-funnel omnichannel strategy, it’s paramount that businesses determine the right consistency and delivery times to win with email marketing.
When looking through your own personal inbox, you may notice many brands that are sending several emails a week, sometimes even daily. The natural thought process would be to follow suit. If they’re sending emails so frequently, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume that they’re bringing in significant revenue. As you start delving into your email strategy, however, remember that success breeds success, so focus on quality over quantity before ramping up.
How Many Emails Is Too Many?
The question above is one that varies depending on your audience size and current sending practices. When doubling down on your email strategy, you should always build on what you have before spreading your resources too far. Let’s take a look at what should be considered when determining your sending cadence.
The Spam Folder
A common sentiment heard by marketers is that the more emails they send, and the more people they send them to, the more revenue they’ll generate! As a blanket concept, that’s not entirely wrong. However, if your email lands in the spam folder, it doesn’t matter how many you send: no one will see them!
Sender’s Reputation
Email providers such as Gmail and Outlook want users to have a positive experience, and anyone who finds themselves inundated with irrelevant emails may decide to choose a different email provider. A business that is either starting email for the first time or has sent extremely sporadically in the past needs to build a reputation before they start sending a high volume of sends. This is affectionately known as “sender reputation.”
Establishing your sender reputation means you will want to start conservatively with your sends. You might consider starting with one or two emails a month as you begin gathering data and getting to know your audience.
Your Audience
In the infancy of your email marketing campaign, you’re getting to know your community. They are, after all, who have the biggest impact on the success of your business. When you send out your first few emails, you’ll be receiving data on performance. There are benchmarks in place that can allow you to get an idea for how your emails are performing. If your benchmarks are drastically lower than these, you may be at risk of hitting the spam folder and will want to segment your audience and pull back on the number of sends until you get them to a better place.
Important email benchmarks:
Open Rate:
35 percent or higher
Click Rate:
2.5 percent or higher
Bounce Rate:
0.8 percent or lower
Spam Complaint Rate:
0.08 percent or lower
As you gather your analytics, you will begin to learn who in your audience is engaged and what they want to see. It’s a good practice to segment out your very engaged audience and send them more email communications than your less engaged audience. You’ll also want to AB test emails to receive concrete evidence on what your audience wants to see. Conduct thorough AB testing before greatly increasing the volume of emails you get out.
Where To Begin With Email Marketing Frequency
Determining your ideal sending cadence comes down to how your emails perform in contrast to audience size. If your subscriber’s list is still relatively small, it’s probably not time to implement a high volume of emails in a single month. Start with one or two emails per month and work backward from there based on campaign success. As your analytics, revenue, and audience grow, add in one additional monthly campaign at a time until you begin to see diminishing returns. This is your inflection point and one to be mindful of as you determine the right email cadence for your business.
Time Is of the Essence
Don’t be detoured or intimidated by the prospect of finding your friction point with email marketing. Start by benchmarking the metrics above and let the data inform your ongoing strategy. This all might be easier said than done! If that’s the case, reach out to our team of email marketing experts for a complimentary, no-obligation account review and consultation.
