This is a question that came up in a meeting with a client yesterday and I thought it would be worth a short post as it is a good question!
Under normal circumstances, I would suggest that the answer has more to do with your internal resources and how much you have to say than it does with the optimal frequency from a marketing perspective as one of the biggest issues with email marketing is sustainability.
To be effective, e-mail marketing needs to be considered in the medium and long term. Rather than being about “sending out an e-mail”, It is more about developing a sustainable e-mail campaign, that builds your profile in the market over time.
To do this, the programme needs to be sustained, so there is no point in committing to sending out an e-mail newsletter every month, if after month 2 you have run out of things to say and are stuggling to meet the deadlines. Better initially to commit to an e-mail every 2-3 months, and be confident that you will be able to keep the programme going indefinitely.
As a small company ourselves, we apreciate the pressures that are put on the management teams of SME companies, and the issues this creates in sustaining ongoing marketing initiatives. That is why once we agree a programme with a client, we see one of our roles as ensuring that focus is kept on marketing, and initiatves are sustained even when things are busy, as it is by doing this that hopefully things don’t get quite!
So back to the question:
“How often should I send marketing e-mails?”
The answer is:
“As often as you believe that you can reliably sustain
in terms of resources & things to say”
If you are looking to develop a sustainable e-mail marketing programme, we would love to talk to you.
