How often should I email?

👉 everyone has a different (biased) answer. Here's what you should actually do.

A very practical tip this time, based on a question I was asked by a friend...

How often should I send out my email newsletter?

I'm going to give you the theoretical answer first, then the more practical one.

So in theory the answer is it depends.

Plenty of people will tell you you need to be emailing daily. Or that once a week is too much or any host of fixed answers.

But the reality is that everyone's customers are different in their capacity and interest in receiving emails.

Corporate types who get tons of emails from bosses and colleagues every day probably have less tolerance for frequent emails than solo business owners who have an urgent problem to solve in the area you're writing about.

It all depends.

That said, here are some eternal truths about email frequency:

1. Our own perceptions of frequency are biased because we only ever hear from people who think we're emailing too often. The impact of not emailing enough (and therefore not getting as many sales as you could) is invisible.

2. Your most likely customers probably want to hear from you more often than less often. Someone who can't cope with you emailing them useful information a couple of times a week is unlikely to suddenly turn around and buy a bunch of stuff from you in that same area.

3. The reality is that your email frequency is going to be much more constrained by your ability to write decent emails than it is by your subscribers ability to read them.

So my practical advice on email frequency is that unless you're one of the 1% who emails multiple times a week, try emailing a little bit more frequently and see what happens.

If you email monthly, try every couple of weeks. If you email every couple of weeks, try weekly. If you email weekly, try twice a week.

In my experience, you almost always get better results.

But the nice thing is that you don't have to guess or take it on faith. Just try it out for a bit.

If it works, keep doing it (or go even more frequent). If it doesn't, go back to where you were before.

No need to argue about what the best frequency is in theory. You can test your way to it in the real world.