How Many Marketing Emails Are Too Many?

Marketing can seem scary to growing businesses, we get it. So let's say your business only sends out one monthly newsletter. Great! But you may want to consider increasing the frequency of your emails by breaking down the content into multiple emails that are focused on one type of conversion. This can increase open rates, bounce rates, engagement, and sales overall!

Why? Because your customers will be happy to see at least one email a week (since they likely forgot they saw your email a week ago). The more leads and customers are exposed to your brand, especially in an email, the higher your chances are of increasing sales.

How many emails are too many emails? How many emails you send depends on many factors. Generally, you can't send too many! No such thing, some will say! Though sending daily emails sounds like a great idea, this isn't always great for all subscribers. We break down how you should determine the frequency. Let's get started!

How Often and Why Should You Send Email Marketing?
Email Marketing Frequency Practices for 2023
Send Marketing Emails for Your Industry
Conclusion

How Often and Why Should You Send Email Marketing?

Why send email marketing campaigns at all if you could risk annoying your customers (and potential customers) by sending too many emails? Your business will surely benefit from sending at least a newsletter every week or month. The number one reason people unsubscribe from emails is because they are sent too frequently.

So, what's the frequency of emails your business should be sending? This needs to be part of your marketing strategy.

This depends on a few things we will discuss in a little bit. First, it's important to understand how most businesses - or marketers, rather, plan their email marketing strategy. Let's cover the top three ways growing businesses focus on sending a large percent of their emails.

How Marketers Send Promotional Emails

Marketing to people who don't want promotional emails is hard to do - not impossible. The frequency (and content, of course) is key. What are some ways you can make these marketing messages NOT seem like annoying marketing messages?

Personalize each message, whether it's putting the lead's name in the email or giving them a discount on an item they've viewed before
Give a discount on an item in a person's cart
Offer free shipping if they haven't visited your site in a while

You've surely seen email marketing like this and perhaps even responded to! Why wouldn't your lead want to become a customer with promised future deals?

How to Send a Welcome Email

What's the best time to send a welcome email? You've probably found that you get a welcome email almost immediately after signing up for newsletters or marketing information.

You'll also find that the cadence is very, well... welcoming. Some other things to add to a welcome email include:

Special discount for signing up
Free downloadable content (download pdf case)
A way to enter a competition or sweepstakes, like a secret link
A way the new lead can set up their profile on your site

TruVISIBILITY has great email templates for welcome emails. You can check out this and many other entirely FREE tools they offer below.

How to Send an Automated Email

Marketing succeeds with automated emails. However, businesses can often annoy leads and customers with their automated marketing messages.

Automated marketing is great. Even in emails - don't get us wrong. But the best way to utilize automated email marketing when starting off should be simple. Do not send complicated marketing messages every day because this will FEEL automated. Even on automated message can seem impersonal. The personal emails are the ones a customer really appreciates and won't hit the "unsubscribe" button for.

This is because your growing business is likely still building a list of contacts. This can take time to segment one by one. Some contacts will go into a "current leads" list while others will be "customers whose birthdays are in June".

One of the top uses for automated emails is to send a welcome email to leads who have just signed up to receive marketing messages from you. Other ways include:

birthday messages and thank yous ("Happy birthday! We want to thank you for being a loyal customer.")
personalized sales offer ("You left this in your cart. Here's a discount just for you!)
Notice of inactivity on a site ("We miss you! Come back to see what's new.")
Purchase and shipping confirmations

Automated messages require businesses keep track of their one of a kind contact list. The list contains people in your database whose activity should be followed in case they forgot something in their cart, have a purchase that just shipped, etc.

Email Marketing Frequency Practices for 2023

Email marketing largely depends on the frequency of these campaigns, and it changes every year! Most professional email marketing specialists suggest starting with sending marketing stuff out twice a month. We've said it before and we'll say it again.

Something that marketing specialists forget (or purposefully leave out) is that businesses will have to understand how to send one email a certain number of times based on experience. For example, last time you upped your email frequency, did you lose or gain engagement?

Customers can lose interest one month and gain interest another if they forgot about your brand and haven't heard from you in a while.

1) Decide the Goal of Your Email Program

When trying to decide how often to send email marketing, it’s helpful to start by asking yourself: why are we sending email in the first place? Is it to get online purchases? Drive website readers? Build loyalty? Close deals?

If your goal is to drive purchases or web traffic, you may be willing to risk a few unsubscribes for higher numbers. But if your audience is made up of customers that your sales team needs to be able to reach at a moment’s notice, you don’t want to clog up their inboxes with marketing emails.

2) Apply Frequency Practices Globally

Think about all the emails your subscribers may be receiving from your organization when adjusting your email frequency. Targeted email advertising is just one channel.

If a customer gets a webinar update, a blog update and a marketing email in the same afternoon, by the time your sales rep reaches out to them they may not even notice.

3) Give Control to Your Subscribers

While not all subscribers will make the effort, it’s a good idea to give them the option to choose their preferred email frequency. You can do this at sign up, in a re-enegagment campaign and as an option on your unsubscribe page.

Adding an Update Subscription Preferences link at the end of your emails is also a common practice. Look at the email preference options from Steam below.

4) Think of Deliverability

Having a long term deliverability strategy is critical if you are going to experiment with increasing email frequency.

Too much email will eventually turn off some subscribers. Low engagement, spam complaints and even low open rates are all red flags to email service providers. As your domain reputation falls, email service providers such as Google and Microsoft may put your email in the promotions tab.

Or they can send it to spam, which is not good.

Keep track of your engagement metrics to fix any problems if you find you have too many hard bounces or even unopened emails. TruVISIBILITY's analytics for your campaigns even allows you to see what percentage and number of emails were never sent.

5) Consistency is Key

Sending regular email will allow you to clean you of your disengaged audience members. If you go six months without emailing your list, there’s a high chance that many people are no longer using the email address you have for them.

Lastly, consistent email communication keeps you top of mind. When your relevant and engaging email regularly shows up in your recipient’s inboxes, you are building brand awareness and relationship with each individual in your email list.

6) Segment Audience by Engagement Level

You wouldn’t keep talking to someone that isn’t listening. So why would you keep emailing them? But this is exactly what many marketers do.

Let’s say you send 1 email per day and average a 10% open rate. A 10% open rate isn't normally considered a great open rate, but it might be just fine as long as it's different people opening all the time.

Is your content the kind of content that people scan subject lines and open regularly if it grabs their attention? In that case, maybe most of your audience is opening an email or two a month.

7) What's Your Industry's Average?

Knowing how often other similar companies are emailing their customers can be helpful when deciding how often should you send out email blasts, or how many emails to send per week.

You can figure this out by a simple online search or subscribing yourself to a few of your competitor's email lists.

8) A/B Testing

You saw it coming. A/B testing can mean you change up just the time you send out an email to sort of develop a case study file. Do most people open email marketing at night? Do they not open emails with subject lines that are stated as a question? Do most people click in an email because you offer great content (like a discount code)?

You can A/B test nearly any digital marketing avenue. What is great about this is most platforms give you the opportunity to view analytics of each email. This means you don't have develop a pdf case study necessarily because all the data is already in the email platform for you!

To read more about A/B testing in landing pages, check out this article about tracking data.

Send Marketing Emails for Your Industry

Services

The service industry includes spas, salons, cleaning services, etc. But it can also include real estate agents, lawyers, and industries who want to provide something intangible, such as a dry cleaning business. Sending emails for these industries can appear "annoying" to leads.

One thing to keep in mind: A good rule of thumb for all businesses, but especially services, is to start sending emails twice a month. This can be a newsletter, but service companies can also start by sending coupons for their services. This can include digital services, like software, as well.

Contractors

Contractors are similar to the service industry, but a little different since they often cannot perform house-calls. Some service industry jobs can be considered contractors. For this example, however, we will focus on a local auto mechanic.

Auto mechanics can start sending newsletters every month if there are updates about the location, pricing changes, etc. Other than that, contractors generally do not send newsletters. Their first 2 emails each month should focus more on giving leads coupons.

Free windshield wipers with every oil change is a great deal, too! It shows customer appreciation and doesn't require a lot of extra content like a ton of images or text. Sometimes, welcome emails or announcements about holiday events, for example, can be added to the monthly campaign strategy.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce businesses offer customers physical things. It could even be a digital copy of a software. However, this means there is just more options to promote things via email.

You can send promotional emails about a new product coming out soon, personalized birthday emails, and:

An email with coupons deals
Personalized welcome email
Newsletter emails
Event announcement emails (or product release announcement)

No matter what, it's always a great idea to keep these things in each email for better changes of sales and customer (or lead) engagement:

Showing the company's "inc." name.
A subscribe option at the end of each email sent
Small icons that lead audiences to each social media channel your business belongs to

Extra things you can leave in each email template can be:

A link to a blog page, if you have one
A link to another important page on your website
A banner with the date and title of the email, such as "October Newsletter", "December Coupon", etc.

All of these template options can be found in TruVISIBILITY's Messaging app, where the tools allow you to change widgets to your heart's content in order to match your brand message and look.

Conclusion

The phrase too much email is vague and different for every industry and each business within those industries. With proper testing, your business may find that you can send daily emails and get a large response from leads and customers alike.

Hopefully, you've learned how to send marketing emails with confidence now that you know how to measure your business's email marketing frequency.

Don't forget to study how other businesses send emails, what emails they send, and how often. Also check out how TruVISIBILITY's marketing tool can specifically help you determine the number of emails that will be beneficial to your particular business.

Email marketing is not scary and can be improved with the help of collecting customer information. TruVISIBILITY's landing page app can often help you boost subscribers, which can mean your sending frequency can increase for different contact lists.

Speaking of emails. We do not automate our newsletters every week. They are catered and written thoroughly for you. Join our list to see what's new with our apps, what you can learn about the apps (and digital marketing in general), and see opportunities to join marketing social channels for people just like us!