The Best Email Marketing Sending Frequency According to 20 Studies

The Best Email Marketing Sending Frequency According to 20 Studies How often should brands send marketing emails? That’s a common question without a single definitive answer. But, you’re responsible for establishing your company’s email schedule and managing the marketing calendar. If your boss asks, â€Å"Are we sending emails at the best possible frequency,† you can’t say, â€Å"That answer is unknowable, young Jedi.† That’s not a helpful response. And it’s condescending to your department head (and you want to keep your job). Plus, if your email frequency isn’t optimized, you might be missing opportunities to convert more leads (or stop chasing away those currently in your funnel). Your list is an invaluable resource, and how often you send to it matters. The best schedule will vary from business to business, but you need a starting point and data to compare against. In this post, you’ll learn what 20 different companies discovered when they tried to answer this question. By the time you’re done, you’ll be prepared to plan a complete email schedule optimized for frequency and pacing. It’ll all be backed by real data, and ready to be fine-tuned based on your own performance. The Best Email Marketing Sending Frequency Backed By 20 Studies via @Snag Your Free Email Schedule Optimization Bundle Use the right tools for the right job. To help you get started managing an effective email schedule, here are three templates to use: Email Marketing Calendar Template: Schedule all those emails in one place (at the best dates and times, of course). Best Times to Send Email Guide: Get some additional insight into which times typically work best. Email Marketing Strategy Template: Plan and organize the complete strategy behind every email you’ll send. †¦ And Plan Your Email Frequency With The easiest way to map out your email schedule is on a calendar integrated into a holistic marketing management platform. With its new email marketing integrations, that platform is . With Email Marketing from , you can: Seamlessly integrate with your *favorite* email marketing platform. You already have a kick-a$$ email platform you know and love, so why give it up? With Email Marketing, you can easily connect your preferred email platform to with just a couple clicks. Write click-worthy email subject lines...every time. With Email Marketing, you can use ’s *exclusive* Email Subject Line Tester to optimize and perfect every subject line to drive more opens, more clicks, and more conversions. Get full visibility into your ENTIRE marketing strategy. Say â€Å"buh-bye† to disjointed marketing content (and constantly jumping from screen to screen). With Email Marketing, it’s easy to see how your email campaigns relate to the rest of your marketing strategy and quickly make adjustments if necessary. With Email Marketing, you can easily connect your preferred email platform (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, and ActiveCampaign) to with just a couple clicks. Here’s how you can get started. Or schedule a free 14-day trial. About the 20 Studies, Blog Posts, and Research Reports So, where did all the research in this post come from? Here’s a breakdown of all 20 studies and posts: Infusionsoft’s post on finding the best frequency to email customers. DMA’s annual email marketing report. Entrepreneur’s pointers on the topic. Campaign Monitor’s surprising findings. Constant Contact’s detailed guide. Sark eMedia’s thoughtful opinions on what offers most value. Traffic Generation Cafe’s syndicated advice courtesy of Daegan Smith. Smart Insights’ research-backed findings. Crazy Egg’s impassioned recommendation to send more emails. Benchmark’s practical guide to choosing days and times to deliver. Fulcrum Tech’s helpful delineation between the terms â€Å"frequency† and â€Å"cadence.† OmniSend’s original research from 2017. Aweber’s answer: there’s no magic number (plus rationale for that conclusion). MailPoet’s more philosophical answer: it depends (and an explanation for that, too). EventBrite’s concise tips specific to event promotion emails. Ignite Visibility’s advice for promotional emails. SendGrid’s useful tips on what to do if your frequency is too  frequent. MailChimp’s email marketing field guide, which touches on frequency. Clickz’s collected research, which includes insights on how often top brands are sending email. ReturnPath’s original research on email frequency. That’s a lot of difference perspectives, from all different types of sources. This ensures the advice in this post isn’t all coming from one perspective, while reflecting the diversity of opinion and thought on this topic. What do 20 different studies say about the ideal email marketing send frequency?Setting Benchmarks: Frequency Vs. Results For comparison purposes, here are some benchmarks gathered by the folks at SendGrid, based on their own original research  (based on â€Å"50 billion messages to over 100,000 different senders in the top 25 industries who sent email through SendGrid†: A few things to point out straight off the bat: The average respondent sent around two emails per week. This marked a decline from 2016 to 2017. Which corresponded with a 3.3% increase in opens and a .4% increase in unique opens. However, unique clicks and clicks overall declined. What does this tell us? We can make a few educated guesses: Consumers are overwhelmed with information overload. Not just in their inboxes, but all over the web. So, reducing email may be an effort to reduce content shock. So, sending slightly less email can potentially improve results. It makes each email appear more valuable (at least initially) if they’re received less often. But, that email needs to be engaging to get clicks. The fact that clicks went down somewhat is slightly concerning, even if CTRs didn’t drop precipitously. This lines up with some other findings this post will dig into a bit later on. What Can Happen When You Tweak Your Frequency? Now, if you’re already sending marketing emails, you might be worried about adjusting your frequency. After all, if you don’t know what might happen, you may not want to risk something going wrong. But, fortune favors the bold. If you really want to know what works, you’ve got to be willing to experiment at least a little bit. To alleviate potential fears, though, here are four possible outcomes that Campaign Monitor says can occur. Unsubscribes Might Go Up Even worse, SPAM reports might go up, too. So, take that as a warning not to go overboard. That data aligns with possible solutions: Engagement Might Drop Citing (gated) data from Return Path, Campaign Monitor’s post reports that engagement could drop if too many low-value emails are sent. Not only could opens drop and unsubscribes increase, but even people who stick around might just disengage. Nothing Happens You make a change and †¦ nothing changes. That’s †¦ okay? Sort of? What this means is it’s time to test another variable. †¦ But, Your Results Could Improve (Dramatically), Too! When you start testing, some things might not go your way. But, once you start to see positive movement, keep at it. The results are worth the effort. In Campaign Monitor’s post, they highlight Aviva, an insurance company based in the UK. They were only emailing their list once a year. You read that right. But, then they increased their frequency. You’ll never believe what happened next: 48% more requested insurance quotes 304% more unique clicks 45% more email revenue Those are some awesome results, and they never would have been achieved without pushing past status quo and the fear of change.