How Often Is Too Often

The wrong question

How often should I send is asked as though there were a number, and the number varies from weekly to annually depending on who is answering.

The reason the advice conflicts is that it depends entirely on what you have to say.

A business with genuinely useful weekly information can send weekly. One with four useful things a year cannot send monthly without eight months of filler.

So the question worth asking is not how often, but how much do I actually have.

The filler problem

What happens when a schedule outpaces the material.

The first three issues are good. The fourth is thinner. By the sixth it is a link to a blog post and a photograph of the office.

Readers notice, and the damage is not that one issue was weak. It is that they have learned the email is not worth opening, which applies to every issue afterwards including the good ones.

A schedule you cannot fill is worse than no schedule, because it trains people to ignore you.

Signals you are sending too often

• Open rates falling issue over issue.
• Unsubscribes rising, particularly after routine sends.
• Complaints, which are the sharpest signal.
• You struggle to fill it, which the reader can tell.
• Clicks concentrated in one or two issues a year.

The fourth is the earliest and the most reliable. If writing it feels like an obligation, it reads like one.

A worked example

A garden centre sending weekly, on the reasoning that seasonal businesses have constant news.

Open rates started around forty percent and drifted to seventeen over two years. Unsubscribes were steady and slightly high.

They moved to roughly monthly during the season and quarterly out of it, sending only when there was something specific: what was in stock, what to plant now, when a particular event was on.

Opens recovered to the mid-thirties. Total clicks across the year rose despite sending less than half as many emails.

The interesting figure was unsubscribes, which fell sharply. People had not disliked the business; they had disliked the volume.

Writing became easier too, because every email had an obvious subject.

Consistency against usefulness

A tension worth resolving honestly.

Consistency has real value. People learn to expect something, and a predictable rhythm is easier to maintain than an ad hoc one.

But consistency is a means rather than the goal. A predictable schedule of things nobody wants is consistently ignored.

The arrangement that works for most small businesses: a stated rough frequency that you comfortably exceed the material for, plus occasional extra messages when something genuinely warrants it.

Quarterly, plus the occasional one-off, is honest for most trades and produces better mail than monthly.

The counter-case

Where frequent sending is right.

Businesses with genuinely perishable information: availability, stock, events, prices that move.

Lists built specifically on the promise of frequency, where somebody signed up for a daily or weekly thing and reducing it breaks the agreement.

And any audience that has told you they want more, which some trade audiences do.

The test is whether the extra emails contain something the previous one did not. If each is distinct and useful, frequency is not the problem.

Letting people choose

An option worth offering once a list is past a few hundred.

A preference for less rather than none keeps people who would otherwise leave over volume.

It has to be genuinely easy and it must not obstruct unsubscribing, which is where this goes wrong.

For a small list sending quarterly, this is unnecessary. For anything sending more than monthly, it is worth having.

The simplest version is two options: everything, or the occasional important one.

What people actually object to

Worth knowing, because it is not quite volume.

People tolerate frequent email from businesses whose messages are useful, and object to occasional email from businesses whose messages are not.

Which means the complaint about too many emails is usually a complaint about too many useless ones, and reducing frequency without improving the content fixes half the problem.

The businesses sending weekly without difficulty are the ones with something weekly to say, and their subscribers do not experience it as frequent.

So the honest first question is not how often to send. It is whether the last three would have been missed, and the frequency answer follows from that.

Seasonal businesses

A pattern that suits a lot of trades and is rarely used deliberately.

Send more during the months when your work is relevant and almost nothing outside them.

A landscaping business has plenty to say in March and very little in December. A heating engineer has the reverse.

Matching the sending to the season is more useful to the reader and easier to write, and it means the quiet months are not spent producing filler.

Say so at signup, so people know the pattern rather than assuming you have gone quiet.

The gap that is too long

The opposite failure, and it is real.

Somebody who signed up in March and hears nothing until the following February has forgotten agreeing. Your name in their inbox reads as unfamiliar, which reads as spam.

That produces complaints from people who genuinely did opt in, which is the worst version of the problem because nobody did anything wrong.

Roughly, a gap beyond six months starts to be risky, and beyond a year it is close to sending to strangers.

Which sets a floor as well as a ceiling: at least twice a year, even for the most seasonal business, and something within a few weeks of somebody joining.

Between twice a year and once a month there is a wide range that works, and the sensible choice inside it depends on your material rather than on anybody's advice.

Deciding yours

1. List what you would send over the next twelve months.
2. Count the genuinely useful ones.
3. That number is your frequency, not a schedule you picked.
4. State it at signup.
5. Watch unsubscribes and opens over the following year.
6. Send less if either moves the wrong way.

The second is the one that settles most arguments. A business that can name four useful emails for the year should send four, whatever the advice about staying front of mind suggests.

What makes any of them worth opening is covered in the newsletter nobody opens.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.