You sat down to write an email to your customers, then stopped. It has been a while, and now you are not sure whether sending one will bring people back or annoy them into unsubscribing. So you close the tab, and another month goes by.
Here is how often you should send marketing emails when you run a small business, how to tell if you have the balance wrong, and what to do about a list that has gone quiet.
How often should you send marketing emails?
Once or twice a month is the right starting point for most small businesses. That is often enough that people remember who you are, and rare enough that you can always find something worth saying. Send on a predictable schedule, such as the first Tuesday of the month, rather than whenever you find a spare hour.
Move to weekly only when you genuinely have weekly news: a restaurant with a changing menu, a shop with new stock, a gym with a class timetable. Most service businesses do not, and a weekly email with nothing in it does more harm than a monthly one that is worth opening.
What happens if you email too often?
People unsubscribe, and the ones who do not simply stop opening. That second group is the expensive one. Gmail and Outlook both watch whether your emails get opened, and a list full of people ignoring you pushes future emails into the promotions tab or the spam folder, including the ones your best customers actually wanted.
Watch your unsubscribe rate. Under 0.5 percent per send is normal. If a send goes past 1 percent, you are either emailing too often or emailing about the wrong things.
What happens if you email too rarely?
Your list decays. People forget they signed up, and an email after eight months of silence gets marked as spam by someone who genuinely does not recognise your name. Spam complaints are far more damaging than unsubscribes, because they follow your sending domain and affect every email after them.
If it has been more than six months, do not send a sales email first. Send one short note that reminds people who you are, says what they will get from now on, and includes an obvious unsubscribe link. Let the people who are gone go quietly, then start your schedule with the ones who stay.
How do you know the right frequency for your list?
Your own numbers will tell you within three sends. Watch three things in whichever email tool you use:
- Open rate. Twenty to forty percent is a healthy range for a small business list. A steady fall across several sends means you are sending too often.
- Click rate. Two to five percent. This is the honest one, because it measures whether people wanted what you offered.
- Unsubscribes. A small, steady trickle is fine and healthy. A jump after one particular email tells you something about that email, not about your frequency.
Change one thing at a time. If you go from monthly to fortnightly, hold that for three months before deciding, because one good or bad send proves nothing.
What should you send that often?
Frequency is usually not the real problem. Running out of things to say is. Four types of email cover most of a year for a small business:
- Something useful. The question you answer on the phone every week, written down once.
- Something new. A service, a product, a change to your hours, a new person on the team.
- Something timely. Seasonal work, a holiday deadline, a reminder that suits the month.
- Something human. A job you were proud of, a customer story, a photo of the work.
Write four subject lines at the start of each quarter and you never face a blank page in a month you are busy.
How do you keep it going when you are busy?
Set aside one hour a month and write the whole email in that hour. Use the same layout every time, so the only work is the words. Most email tools let you save a template and duplicate last month’s send, which turns an hour into twenty minutes by the third one.
The honest catch is that the sending is the easy part. Keeping a clean list, writing something worth reading, and looking at what happened afterwards is the work, and it is the part that gets dropped first in a busy month. If you would rather it simply happened without you, our monthly email service covers the writing, the sending and the reporting, and runs $275. If you are not set up at all yet, getting onto a platform properly is a one off job that runs $220.
Target Marketeer builds and runs marketing for small businesses nationwide, based in Greensboro, North Carolina, and email is usually the cheapest lever a business has, because the people on that list already know you.
Quick answers
How often should I email my customers?
Once or twice a month suits most small businesses. Weekly only works when you genuinely have weekly news, such as a changing menu or new stock. The schedule matters more than the number, because a predictable email gets opened.
Is it bad to email customers every week?
Only if you have nothing to say. A weekly email with real news performs well, and a weekly email padded with filler drives unsubscribes and trains inbox providers to treat your address as promotional.
What is a good unsubscribe rate?
Under 0.5 percent of recipients per send is normal for a small business. Above 1 percent, look first at what you sent rather than how often you send.
What do I do with a list I have not emailed in a year?
Send one short reminder of who you are and what people will get from now on, with an easy unsubscribe. Expect a wave of unsubscribes, and treat that as cleaning rather than loss. The people left are the ones worth emailing.
How much does email marketing cost for a small business?
Email platforms are free up to a few hundred contacts and typically run twenty to fifty dollars a month after that. The real cost is the time to write and send. Agencies generally charge a few hundred dollars a month to run it for you, depending on how many sends and how much writing is involved.
If you are working out what to send rather than how often, turning your customer list into repeat business covers the emails that actually bring people back, and bringing past customers back with a simple email is the one to read if your list has gone cold. When you are ready to set the whole thing up, our email marketing services page lays out what is involved.
