How Often Should You Send Promotional Emails?

A common question that many business owners have is how frequently they should be sending out promotional emails. Is there an optimal send frequency?
​
It's difficult to determine an optimal frequency for how often you should be sending promotional emails because this can vary greatly depending on your industry and audience. 

However, a recent survey conducted by MarketingSherpa revealed some powerful data for how frequently brands should be sending out marketing emails. The study asked 2,057 adults how often they wanted to receive promotional emails.

Here's what we learned from this survey:

• Almost 90 percent of respondents wanted to receive promotional at least monthly
• Approximately 60 percent of respondents wanted to receive promotional emails at least weekly
• Less than 10 percent of respondents said that they never wanted to receive promotional emails

Obviously, a big takeaway from this survey is that sending promotional emails at least once a month is very well received. However, a valid concern for only sending monthly emails is that it's too infrequent, causing some subscribers to forget who you are. 

Sending promotional emails at least once a week was the second most preferred frequency according to this survey. This frequency allows brands to stay in front of their audience without bombarding them. 

One email marketing issue that you need to be aware of is undermailing, which can happen when you don't have a consistent frequency for sending promotional emails. Here are a few repercussions that your business can experience from undermailing:

• Poor or inconsistent sender reputation
• Challenges maintaining a clean subscriber list
• Higher risk of triggering spam traps
• Lower lifetime value
• Missed revenue opportunities

As you can see, there's really not a one-size-fits-all answer to what the optimal send frequency should be for your marketing emails, so it's best to test the waters and see what works best for your subscribers. 

You can even ask your subscribers directly how often they would like to receive promotional emails from your business by allowing them to control this through a preference center. This is a great way to keep your email unsubscribe rate under control as they can opt to receive emails from your business on just a monthly basis instead of weekly, daily, etc. 

If you decide that you are going to increase how frequently you send out promotional emails, it's very important that you continue to optimize your emails with helpful content so that your subscribers are getting more value by hearing from your brand more often. 

Once you have a chance to carefully test which email send frequency works best for your business, we'd love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts in our comments section.