Email newsletter frequency
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This whole report is about generating influence and impact through your newsletter. What you send to your readers plays the biggest role in this, but how often you send it has a role too.
Advertisers talk frequently about frequency - their aim is to get an effective message in front of their targets on a minimum number of occasions and within a certain period of time. We can draw lessons from this.
Given the competition for attention in inboxes, your newsletter has to appear often enough to trigger recognition and build awareness. As ever, there are no hard and fast rules here, and a lot of other factors determine frequency, too. Nevertheless, here are some guidelines:
- any email newsletter that comes out less frequently than once a month is unlikely to make an impression on its readers. If you can't support at least a monthly publication, then think in terms of promotions rather than newsletters.
- very frequent newsletters (more frequent than weekly) or very infrequent newsletters (less frequent than monthly) must offer exceptional value or impact. For infrequent newsletters, exceptional value and impact can make up for infrequency. For frequent newsletters, exceptional value and impact justifies the time the reader has to allocate to the emails.
- your preferred frequency from the perspective of recognition and awareness also depends on how else you are communicating with these email addresses. Take into account other newsletters you may be sending them, or whether you already send them promotional emails. In other words, look at the bigger picture before settling on a frequency.
Type of information
Different topics are suited to different publication frequencies. The more "current" and "perishable" the information, the more frequently you'll need to publish.
Consider, for example, fish price updates, horoscopes and headline news (best suited to daily or weekly publications), or cake recipes and fitness advice (fit easily into a biweekly or monthly format).
If the content you want to deliver to your readers has a "best before date", then take this into account when determining frequency.
Need more email marketing guidance? Try the email newsletter.