How often should I email my list? This is a question we often get here at Growth Generators. Most people don’t know how often emails should go out or clean their email list.
A good general rule:
Clean your email list every six months or after your last 12 emails sent.
Whichever comes first. This will help you keep a clean email list while removing stale or uninterested contacts. It’ll also help improve your email deliverability and engagement as well.
Those numbers may sound strange or weird. But let me break down the logic of why this is the magic number and how often you should send.
At minimum, we always recommend our customers to email at least once a month. In an ideal world, it’s every week or every other week. If you can do it, we recommend multiple times per week.
This helps drive engagement. As long as not too many of your emails are sales emails, this will help you in the long term. The faster you can get 6-12 emails into someone’s inbox, the better.
With modern email systems such as Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Encharge, , it’s easy to see what contacts are engaged vs. disengaged.
Why Clean Your Email List After Six Months?
Chances are you want to do a monthly email blast. You don’t prefer to do an email every other day or every week, and that’s fine. This is where the six-month rule comes into play. Let’s think about your customer journey.
That potential customer or email subscriber had to get on your list somehow. Most of the time, they visit your website and submit their email for promotional items or discounts!
This is the first interaction they are having with you and your brand. The general rule of sales is most people buy after the 7th interaction, and after that, you hit a point of diminishing returns.
If your email system is set up properly, then they have had one interaction with your website. They should get a confirmation email once they submit their email address.
Now it’ll bring them to a second interaction. If you set up your emails to have a basic level of automation, there should be between 2-5 automated emails following their subscription to your email list. Now it’ll bring you to a minimum of 3 – 8 interactions.
Over the next six months, you will be sending out a minimum of 6 emails, bringing your interactions to a minimum of 9 – 14 emails. If they haven’t opened any of those emails in that time frame, you have a problem.
That problem is your emails enter the spam folder, or that person has zero interest in what value you have to provide for them. Either way, that’s a problem that you can solve.
If your email sending reputation is that low, you need to clean up your email list ASAP and start your road to recovery. This can take a couple of months of email blasts to a highly engaged audience. If the emails are landing in their inbox but aren’t being opened, you need to get some better headlines and rework your emails to provide more value. It’s really that simple!
What Does Having A Clean Email List Do?
Having a clean email list is vital to the health of your company. It may sound strange to some, but having a clean and up-to-date email list is beneficial for several reasons.
The main one being if your company is struggling to grow, but you have a clean email list, it’s rather quick and straightforward to pump out a few emails to an engaged audience and drum up some sales.
Along with frequent cleaning, the chances of those emails landing in the spam bucket on someone’s email provider are drastically lower than most other times.
Email servers will register your email as a safe sender, and your deliverability will drastically increase with time. This is invaluable, and the higher the percent to land in someone’s inbox, the higher the chances of you making more sales.
Make Sure Your Emails Get Opened More Often
If you’re collecting people’s emails but don’t have the best open rates, don’t worry. There is a simple solution for this that will fix your problems.
The first is to use a lead magnet. Provide value through something like a checklist, worksheet, or an info guide.
But here’s the catch…
Don’t redirect them once they hit the ‘subscribe’ button. Instead, include it in their email, even if it’s a link to a page on your website to download it. This will drastically increase the likelihood of people opening that first email. Show them a message after they subscribe and tell them to check their spam folder.
Going into their spam folder to look for the email and move it to their inbox means the email provider that you’re a safe sender and keep an eye out for your emails. You can also provide instructions in that first email to whitelist your email address. This will help people open their emails and increase their deliverability.
These techniques help drastically get people to open emails and, over time, will have a positive effect on your ability to drive sales through email.
Another great strategy is to double opt-in. This is where they submit their email address and are brought to a new screen or lightbox that will show them a couple of new areas for identifiers like first name and last name.
This makes sure the person submitting their information knows what they are getting themselves into, and even though those double opt-ins typically convert emails at a lower rate, the deliverability is significantly higher.
It’s your choice what you prefer to do, but rumor has it double options typically produce significantly more high-paying clients than a single option. This is your choice, and you can weigh the pros and cons of both.
The Most Beneficial Part Of Frequent Emails
With the technology available from email sending providers, it’s easier now than ever to set up automation. With automation, you can have self-cleaning lists, and this is my favorite aspect of technology. There are ways to create rules and segments that tell the system if someone doesn’t open x number of emails to put them in a do not email list.
You can choose to reserve this list for a quarterly email blast or not email them all together.
This automates the process of self-cleaning and engaging an audience. Another great strategy is when this happens, you can send one last email. It’s called the breakup email. If structured right, it can have a significant impact on your email list.
It goes like this…
Subject: I think it’s time we take a break, and it’s not you. It’s me.
Hey, First Name, Harrison here from Growth Generators. I see you haven’t been opening my emails. Hope everything is ok. I don’t want to bother you anymore, so that I will remove you from my list. If you choose to remain on this list, open this email or open any of my previous emails over the last couple of weeks. This will let my system know you still want to hear from us and will re-subscribe you to our email list. If you never want to hear from us again, scroll to the bottom of this email and click the unsubscribe button, and you will never hear from us again.
All the best, Harrison Baron
This may sound weird or strange to send but keep in mind. They are only getting this if they haven’t opened your last 12 emails or so.
Chances are good they aren’t opening this one, and if they do, they either want to be removed altogether, or they have been busy and haven’t had a chance to open your emails.
The subject line should be incredibly catchy, or in the marketing world, it should be clickbait.
Something so juicy that the reader would have to open it regardless of the info inside.
You give them an easy way to unsubscribe or decide to stay active on your email list. Either way is totally fine. Once you set up your rules and automation, this becomes automated, and you never had to think about cleaning your list.
In Conclusion
If you want to include everyone on your list in a quarterly email, that’s great, but for the most part, if they haven’t opened your last dozen emails, they don’t care to hear from you again.
Suppose you need help or have questions about email deliverability, feel free to send us a message on the contact page. We are happy to help!
If you would like to set up some email automation and learn more about how it can grow your business, let us know. Email is the most powerful part of marketing as it can be directly tied to sales and the growth of a business.
If you’re running into problems implementing these tips or you want to run a hand-off content marketing campaign, contact us today, and we’ll be glad to help.