How Often Should You Email Your List?
Man Bites Dog. The Stuff That Works I guardianmarketing.substack.com
How often should you email your list?
(Hint: “As much as possible” is not the best answer)
First, I'm going to interrupt myself on the "should" there.
I posed the question because that's what most people ask - how often should I email my list?
My intent is not to give you prescriptive advice here.
But after 10+ years of email marketing, I have pretty solid experience and perspective on the impact different pacing has with your list and your audience.
So,
I'm going to share with you my experience, my perspective, my data, and how I think about email, and specifically how I think about and choose broadcast frequency.
I think this will serve as a fine starting point for you to work from and collect your own data.
Just as a brief aside,
I'm categorizing any email that is not a part of an automation as a broadcast. Emails that are not automatically triggered, but which are written and sent by themselves.
Typically in an email strategy, you'll have a set number of automation series that trigger on predictable behavior points - welcome series post subscribe, post purchase, interest based triggered series, abandoned cart, etc.
Outside of that you'd typically send emails on a set schedule. Monthly, bi monthly, weekly, bi weekly, daily - these are all common frequencies.
How do you chose how often to send your broadcast emails?
One more caveat:
My perspective and experience is with email lists from a couple hundred, up to about 30-50k in size, with segments broken down to 10k-15k or less (more on that another time). If you're working on an email list in the hundreds of thousands or millions, I don't have the experience to speak to that.
Let's begin ...
What is the purpose of broadcast email?
Understanding the answer to this question might actually be all you need to know in order to decide your frequency.
What is your reason for sending broadcast emails?
Is it to sell as much as possible?
Is it to build a relationship?
Is it to build and sustain attention and engagement?
Is it to teach, give value, etc?
On the most basic level, broadcast emails are a consistent part of any email strategy because if you don't regularly communicate via email, people forget about you, and the emails you do inevitably send become less and less effective.
This is to say nothing of the 15/85 concept (from Dean Jackson1) - where 15% of your buyers happen in 90 days and the other 85% happen in 2 years (so you better have a way to engage prospects for 2+ years to fully benefit).
So,
On a baseline we can say across the board the purpose of broadcast emails is some level of sustained awareness, engagement, and interest in your brand, personality, products, services, solutions, etc.
(“Selling” is a byproduct of that effort - I don’t consider it the purpose, and you’ll see why shortly)
The more in detail you go to understand why you're sending email, the easier it will be to set the rest of your strategy, which you'll see as I lay things out.
First,
I want to just throw some data out there.
To show you, from a purely data driven perspective, what results are possible with a monthly email, a weekly email, a daily email, and a monthly series broadcast.
(For that last one, in my previous business publishing a magazine all about coffee, through experimentation I ended up doing a 3 part broadcast whenever I published a new issue, over 3 days after publishing)
Broadcast Email Data Examples
Because data is data, and it tells us things:
Results from daily emails
These are all from the same list. Just a few examples pulled from a 6 month period of emailing daily.
An important note: One of the areas I’ve utterly failed as a freelance marketer is keeping useful track of my data. I’ve tracked my data for sure, but until the last year or so, I didn’t do it with screenshots or videos.
An unfortunate error. As it means a lot of my work evidence is just my notation of data results, and not more easily acceptable proof.
(Freelancers … heed my warning … consistently collect screenshot and video proof of your work)
This means that the only screenshot based data of daily broadcasts I can share with you is from a very tiny list of 30-40 people over the last 6 months.
I can say that I tested daily emails with the magazine list of 20-30k and my open rates dropped precipitously (down to around 15%) - this was about 8 years ago. I have much more experience and understanding now that would likely apply that better, but it did give me clarity on when and how daily can be useful, and lead to the process I ended up with which centered around using broadcast to support content launches (see the 3 part monthly series below).
I am certain if the below list size was in the thousands, the open rates would be more like 30-40 instead of 40-50, and the ctr would be lower. That’s just how that dynamic pans out.
What you can’t see from this data (because I have no way of showing this) is that though my individual emails range from 0% ctr to up to 8%, over a month period 30%+ of my list would click through on something, and 10% of the list clicked through multiple times on different things.
(The reason I know this is I opened every email and looked at every reader and manually counted it all)
That’s a lot of excellent activity which adds to the relationship and long term interest of the readers.
Here is data from a few daily emails I’ve sent recently (these have all resulted in people visiting The Guardian Academy and Man Bites Dog and subscribing to those publications):
Results from weekly emails
These are all from the same list, from a client for whom I built out a full email strategy and then emailed weekly over the course of a year. Below are just a few examples pulled from a 12 month period of emailing weekly.
Results from monthly emails
Just like with daily emails, I have no screenshots of this data.
In reference to the business that the above weekly email data came from, before I came along they were sending to the same list monthly and averaging about 18% open rate.
As referenced in the series below, when I sent to my coffee magazine’s email list monthly I averaged about 33% open rate (and that was before privacy constricted open tracking so it was as accurate is it ever was).
The magazine list size hovered between 20k-30k (I aggressively lead generated and pruned with strategic filtering using automations).
My point basically is that individual email engagement can be relatively consistent. Emailing more in the right way just flat out increases engagement, relationship, good will, activity, etc.
BUT. At only monthly, you start to lose people a lot more readily than if you try to fit to weekly.
Results from monthly series
The monthly series is an example of taking a single monthly event - publishing a magazine issue in this case - and instead of sending 1 email, splitting that email into a 3 part series sent over 3 days.
Unfortunately I never took screenshots of this data. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.
I went from about 30-35% open rate per email to 60-70% for the 3 part series total (in other words, with 3 emails I doubled how many people read about the issue publication).
That resulted in … surprise surprise … twice the rate of paid subscribers to the magazine, compared to one email.
Conclusions from the Data
The data alone shows us one thing ...
Everything “works.”
Each data example is "working well" for consistent levels of engagement (30-60% open rates and 2-5% CTR over a monthly period).
But the truth of "everything works" is that it is entirely context dependent. What you can surmise from my data (which I'll get into in a moment), is that I bias my decision making on email strategy for maximum sustained "engagement."
And in each data case above, the frequency was determined based on unmeasurable factors (reader experience and expectation) in order to build and maintain a certain level of "engagement."
And I make that frequency as much as possible within certain boundaries.
For example,
That 3 part broadcast split - when I started off with email for my coffee magazine, I'd send one email every time I published an issue. Kind of like a monthly newsletter to accompany the issue publication.
That worked fine.
But I also knew that one of the best "tricks" you can do to increase open rates on an email is to simply resend the email to people who didn't open.
(That is for another time)
However, rather than just resend, I wanted to give everyone a reason to read more, so instead of sending 1 email, I split it into 3. I doubled the amount of people engaging with each release by doing so, which had obvious excellent subsequent effects on readership and subscriber base of the magazine itself.
What I couldn't do was email every day because I had no reason at the time, beyond the publication of a new issue, to communicate.
(Hindsight reveals deeper strategy that could have been implemented, but that's not what this article is about here)
As another example,
The daily email was from my personal list. I can compare that daily strategy to my previous frequency which is more monthly or twice monthly.
The outcome of switching to the daily tactic was far more engagement with publications like this one - I'd lead people to an article or something useful every day, and that sustained a 30% CTR over a month period vs previous I'd average about 10%.
That's obvious,
I sent more emails so I got more interaction.
The more you send, usually the more you make.
HOWEVER
That is only the case if "the more you send" makes sense for your list.
In the daily email example above, I made my daily email a personal window into my life and experiences. My readers enjoyed getting those every day.
This brings us to ...
Clarity which is not available in the data
Heres where it gets hairy.
These are conclusions pulled from analysis of each separate business which go beyond the strict data. Beyond the open, click, and conversion rates.
Let's start with straight monthly emails.
My personal conclusion on these is that monthly is the bare minimum, however unless you have a very strong brand and people are interacting with you on a more frequent basis than monthly (in other ways like social media, youtube, etc), you'll have a high level of dropoff and likely eventually settle around 15-18% or whatever your industry average is.
A weekly newsletter can sustain monthly engagement levels of 60-70% of the audience (with a 90-97% engagement over a 3 month period ... there's always drop-off, and it depends on your lead generation path, but at a certain point you can minimize churn just be cultivating the right interest).
A daily newsletter will not beat the weekly in terms of those metrics, but what it can do is increase the click throughs and more importantly, build a stronger relationship with you, more consistent interactive behavior with the brand, and be a very good road to excited fans.
(It's not the only way to do that of course)
One more aside before I continue ...
What the Heck is "Engagement"
What does this mean?
I look at engagement in different ways.
There's the obvious trackable engagement - open rates, click rates, reply rates, conversion rates.
But then there's what I could just call "overall engagement" which is the relative level of engaged people (be it reading, clicking, replying, buying, etc) over a certain time period.
So if we look over a month period in terms of email, and we consider the open and click rates ...
(Hold your horses on efficacy of open rates in our increasingly data-privacy driven world, I'll address that in a different article altogether)
What we want is to see a higher level of people engaged over all. So when I look at a monthly newsletter, and it has 20% open rate and 1% CTR, and then I compare that to 4 weekly emails which combined show a 50% of the list opening and 2% clicking ... we can safely say we've "doubled engagement."
Why is this important?
The Conversion is What Matters, but not the way you think
There's an obsession with email marketers and email copywriters about focusing on the conversion from the email as the sole stat you should care about.
And it stands to reason that they focus on this.
Because, and I know this from personal experience having marketed myself and worked with many clients specifically as an email copywriter and email marketer ...
When that's your role, you are usually measured on the direct impact of your work.
This is a whole 'nother' article,
But the side effect is that there is an overvaluing of direct tracked conversion from email.
If you forget about tracking the direct conversion and look at your overall data,
You'll most likely notice that if you get 2x as many people engaged via email, you'll get 2x as many sales in the same period even if none if it appeared to come from email.
Just think about it.
Twice as many interested and engaged people with your brand ... why wouldn't you have twice the sales?
It's not always clean cut like that, but very often your conversions are not coming directly from your email unless that's the ONLY way they can buy.
Here's a typical human behavior:
Receive email. Read email. Have interest. Go do life. Later, whip out phone, visit website, buy.
(Or more accurately, they read emails for 3 months and then go buy)
You might be on the can, watching tv, driving somewhere, in the store, whatever, and your mind wanders to whatever is fresh ... if you've been reading a lot of emails from me, I'll probably pop up. And if you have a desire for what I'm selling, you'll think about it. And if you're ready and able to buy, your gonna go buy, whether that's clicking from an email I sent or just going to the website and buying.
The point is, the communication and engagement via email has a clear influence towards bringing people to purchase, even if it's not directly attributable.
So, how often do you email?
The clearest answer is,
As often as it makes sense for the maximum level of sustained interested engagement with your audience and fans.
I'll share my advice on each.
For this, lets start daily.
Because, no matter how much you email, I believe it's useful to answer the question "why should they open this email?"
There's a concept I've long used I got from a friend and brand marketing specialist Joshua Valentine, called "Event Relevancy." In short, for someone to be interested enough to open your email, it's got to be relevant to the events happening in their life.
A level of engagement and participation in whatever your business is doing can be that level of relevancy.
But you've got to be clear on why it is they are really reading your emails. What it is they really get from them.
So,
What is the reason someone will read an email from you every single day?
There are arguments to be made,
Value and contribution and all that,
But I find the most consistently "accurate" answer to that question, is this:
Someone will read an email from you every single day, if they are looking forward to reading an email FROM YOU every day.
Does that sound simple and boring? It kind of is. But it’s the truth you must address.
A quick example.
In the above data, the weekly email stats I pulled were from a past client - they ran a yoga academy in Thailand. I'll be including more about them in a future article where I demonstrate application of R32 through a full email strategy.
They sold yoga teacher training retreats, where you visit there for a month and learn how to become a yoga instructor while deepening your practice (so their average invoice was several thousand)/
I chose weekly because I identified that as the right cadence for the sort of content we were sending, which was focused on enhancing their practice and their life through the wisdom and insight that built the brand (the personality behind it all).
All I needed to do was keep a high level of engagement and the natural conclusion would be an equally higher level of conversions.
We could have gone daily,
BUT,
That would have had to be more personal communication directly from the brand owner … the compelling reason to read every day was for people to hear from the one person they wanted to hear from the most.
And he did not want to go to that level.
We also didn’t need to go to that level to get outstanding impactful results.
Weekly worked well because we went deep on some concept, insight, or physical practice every week. Our monthly engagement ended up steady around 60% for the entire list.
Why email more?
It's arguable whether we would have sold more in the short term, but if we had focused on establishing a closer bond and relationship with the personality at the front of it all, it's likely longer term conversions would continue to increase because loyalty and obsession would increase.
In other words, it would be more about increasing fans than anything.
More on that in my R3 analysis of that project.
Point is, I didn't pick daily for them because there was no reason for people to read daily. If I forced a higher frequency for the sake of emailing more, it would not have benefitted that business.
Frequency analysis by length
Here's a rule of thumb you can consider.
The more frequent you email, the shorter / lighter / funner you probably want the emails to be.
For daily emails I like to think of them as tiny episodes into the tv show that the brand personality's life is. That to me is the easiest way to give people a reason to tune in every day, and it also focuses the creation on lighter, interesting, digestible emails.
They can still be highly valuable. And therein lies the skill challenge of the writer. (More on that in another article, TBD)
If you like to write longer more in depth emails, most likely you'll benefit from 1-2 times per week rather than daily.
HOWEVER.
I have seen daily deep emails work in one unique case. Lukas Resheske did this with his personal list some time back for about a year. But there are several caveats.
- Everyone subscribing to his list did so with the specific intent of reading the unveiling of his deep thoughts every single day
- It was hard to subscribe to his list, you had to dig for it.
- There was no incentive to join his list.
I share that because, no matter what, you will benefit most by considering the experience, expectation, perception, and interest of your readers above all else.
If you intentionally craft an email experience where you are overtly delivering a novel every day and you have people sign up for that, then by all means ...
But that is almost certainly NOT your situation.
What you have to fight against
What you're ultimately "fighting" against is where everyone's attention wants to go.
Your competition for attention is boundless.
And no doubt there are MUCH more enticing sources of dopamine for people out there.
So you have to ask yourself,
“Why the hell are they going to read ME over anything or anyone else they have easily available?” (netflix, tik tok, youtube, etc)
This is why I lean into relationships.
Because if you can get people authentically invested in you and hearing from you ... nothing else can replace that.
The alternate point of view
The alternate view to my perspective on frequency, if you don't care about finessing a long term fandom, is that you are playing a numbers game.
This is often the case with ecommerce.
Though you could try to combine the two.
I should preface this by saying I have limited experience working with email in the ecommerce space, as in my time as a freelancer, I typically worked with brands that have a personality at their forefront (and I've been particularly good at taking personalities who focus on video/audio and putting them effectively in writing).
However I have some experience, and I pay attention to the industry.
It's been my observation that most email ecom plays a short term numbers game of blasting their list. Because the more offers you put in front of people they more people will buy.
Seems to work.
I don't personally like that game, because I find, even in ecommerce, if you can slow down and play a longer term game, your long term strength will be much greater than your short term churn and burn (which will only work for so long anyway).
What about segmentation?
I'm going to address this separately, but I know the question will be on some people's minds.
There are many compelling reasons to segment.
However,
If you are running an email list based around a personality,
Ask yourself - "What can I write that everyone on the list will be interested to read?"
You might find it's not actually all that useful to heavily segment.
(Most of the time on personality based lists I only segment for activity so that I can easily scrub the list when appropriate)
Otherwise, just think about the experience and expectation of your readers. If you’re trying to write and send an email that would only be interesting and useful to a segment of them …
Well then … segment.
Don’t make it complicated.
A summary for reference
Email daily when - there's a highly compelling reason for someone to desire and read an email from you every day. In my experience that's best executed when it's personal and when you make it light and entertaining.
Email 1-2 times per week when - you don't have a highly compelling reason for someone to desire your email every day. Most likely you're writing something longer that takes more than a minute to read, digest, and get what they want out of it.
Email monthly when - you don't have enough to write about for emailing weekly.
YMMV.
Engage the Field.
Try things out with your audience. See how people react.
If your audience is going to be interested in your daily email, you'll likely see a sustained 30-40% open rate (higher if your list is a few hundred to a couple thousand, but likely dropping as you hit 5 figures in email subscribers -- that's a very general guideline).
Usually the more you send, the more you benefit, but it has to work and make sense for your audience and the experience you are building.
If you work with email and you'd like to pick my brain about email marketing/copywriting specifically or in general, comment below - I'll happily go into depth responding to any question in time.
If you'd like more direct access, you can find me live on The Arena3 calls (and if you're joining The Arena specifically to talk about email, let us know and I'll make certain I'm there to help).
If you're interested in my writing that is more about writing in general (and is more personally me, and my life), check out my Substack Growing Trees4, where I talk about the process growing as a writer. I'll occasionally touch on marketing/copywriting stuff there, but for the most part marketing content (especially as it pertains to email) I write will be here on Man Bites Dog.
Be Useful. Make Cool Stuff.
Joseph Robertson, CMO Man Bites Dog
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