Many web marketers often wonder how often to send email newsletters. Let's explore how email send frequency influences unsubscribe rates and the number of opens for such emails.
It is a common belief that sending newsletters too frequently will cause recipients to unsubscribe more often. This is not always true; sometimes it is useful to remind your subscribers of you more than once a week. Why? The longer the time since a user subscribed to your list, the less relevant and timely your newsletter may appear to them. If a user hasn't heard from you for a couple of months and then receives your newsletter, they may think it is just another spam they never subscribed to and delete it even without opening. Such infrequent emails will be less relevant and your subscriber list can shrink sharply (also this is considered as a red flag for email services like Mailchimp). Want to make sure your sending frequency is neither too high nor too low? Aim for the "just right" middle ground.
Email send frequency and its CTR
HubSpot published results of their experiments confirming the opinion that you should not send newsletters rarely. They looked at how their CTR and unsubscribe rates changed when they increased the monthly frequency of email sending. It turned out that if you send your subscribers emails 4 or 5 times a month, increasing the number of monthly newsletters does not cause a sharp drop in clicks.
Unsubscribe rates
Also, if you send newsletters 4 or 5 times a month, you can send them much more often and this will not increase the number of unsubscribes; in fact, they may even decrease, as shown in the chart.
Email addresses of your subscribers may change over time, and if you send newsletters very rarely, you should be prepared for a higher unsubscribe rate. However, you should not go crazy and bombard users with emails every day. That is always worse and causes more irritation than infrequent newsletters. According to HubSpot, 69% of American email users unsubscribe because newsletters arrive too often. That is why it is better to keep the sending frequency to one, two, or at most three times per week!
There is no universal magic number of newsletters that works for everyone, so to create an effective email marketing strategy you need to start with a schedule. Create a calendar and send newsletters once a week, then experiment by increasing or decreasing the frequency within reasonable limits – don't bomb your customers with emails.
Content is king
Separate from frequency, the quality of content has a very strong influence on the permissible email send frequency. Never write just to remind people of yourself. The content of your emails should primarily be useful to your subscriber base, otherwise they will happily unsubscribe.