What’s the Best Email Marketing Newsletter Frequency & Other Thoughts
I’ve had plenty of debate about the best email newsletter frequency (or how much email marketing was too much in general) throughout my years of working as a marketer. There are always mixed feelings.
Not about the necessity of the actual newsletter.
Pretty much everyone agrees that an email newsletter can be a great thing for a brand.
It’s the frequency that gets people hung up.
The fear is always that by sending an email marketing newsletter too often, you’ll mark yourself as THAT BRAND. The one that blasts people’s inbox with crappy email after crappy email until they regret the day they ever made the mistake of giving you their contact information to begin with.
It’s not an unusual circumstance, to be fair.
I’ve unsubscribed to more brand emails and marketing newsletters than I’d like to admit as a marketer.
So I understand the hesitancy when I recommend sending email marketing newsletters at a frequency of once a week. Once every 10 days. There’s always this look in people’s eyes as they counter with, “How about once a quarter?”
Why?
- My feeling is what’s the point of having a database full of contacts if you’re scared to ever talk to them? Isn’t the whole point of collecting email addresses to actually communicate when you have something to say?
- Your fear of having people unsubscribe, complain or call you out for spam should be channeled into making sure YOU CREATE VALUABLE CONTENT.
The point is stop sending stupid spam or promos.
Quick story.
I once had a manager recommend that we try to hide the unsubscribe button, or at least not make it look so prominent and appealing.
If people want to unsubscribe, having to search to find your unsubscribe link will only make them more certain that they don’t want to be on your mailing list.
And if your email newsletter content is of value to your audience, why would they be looking for the unsubscribe link?
There’s nothing to worry about if your content is actually high-quality stuff. And if it’s not, then the conversation needs to be totally different.
In any case, there is actual data to what your email marketing newsletter cadence should be.
But no one is going to be able to dictate the perfect frequency to you.
Here are general best practices for figuring out what frequency works best for your email marketing newsletter and to improve overall performance of your newsletter campaign:
- Test, test test. Segment your list and send at different frequency. Don’t stop there. Test the call-to-action, subject line, plain text versus fancier, tone of voice, etc.
- Use email marketing best practices to improve performance.
- Apply tried-and-true visual design principles to make it look appealing.
- Allow people to personalize as many things about what they receive from you as possible. Develop multiple versions of the newsletter based on preferences, like different topical focus.
Got great tips for how to build a better marketing newsletter? Got horror stories about awful newsletters you’ve received? Other random marketing thoughts you want to share? I’d love to hear from you. Follow and tweet me!
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