Every marketer we speak to wants to know the “perfect” number of email campaigns they should send and when: you need enough to get the best response, but not send so often that your subscribers stop paying attention or worse unsubscribe and our data at mailPDQ suggests that sending a new campaign roughly every couple weeks is probably best, so what is the ideal email frequency?.
Your send frequency influences both opens and unsubscribes
You probably aren’t surprised to hear that the highest open rate is usually always on the first send however we find that the more campaigns you send, the more unique numbers of people will open your campaigns…. upto a point.
Judging large email sends we found that the highest overall open rate for businesses who sent over 5 campaigns in a 3 month period with under 25,000 subscribers is always after the 1st campaign. That same group had a unique open rate on their 6th campaign of 44%. This correlates to an increase in unsubscribes and thus, results in a decrease in overall open rate as shown in the graph below.
The good news: after the 6th campaign, almost half of your subscribers have seen at least one of your campaigns and at least 13% of people have clicked.
The ideal send frequency
However, as we all know, you can’t just keep sending more and more email as there comes a point where you have to consider your diminishing returns and as the unique open rate slows, so do the unique clicks. Therefore you need to weigh your increase in unique opens against how much response you are driving and then look at the cost of producing campaigns against the potential return of those additional campaigns.
What’s the best solutions? Well our data suggests every two weeks is the best frequency for getting the most people to see your emails without damaging your subscriber list. Though of course, you should always test to see what works best for your business and we can help with that, simply contact the team here at mailDPQ.
