How often should you email? It’s more than you think

In the golden age of direct response and mail-order advertising, businesses discovered the more mail they sent their lists, the more sales they made.

They even came up with an adage: “The money is in the list.” Which meant building and refining your own list to make it something a competitor would not have access to, creating not only a reliable revenue stream in sales but also a responsive list you could “rent” to other similar mail order businesses.

While our marketing focus these days is mostly digital, financial content marketers always seem to ask: How much email is too much?

If you’re not sure how to set a consistent cadence for your financial email marketing, this post can help.

Getting real

The most important thing to remember about your email list is that they subscribed because they actually want to hear from you.

They’re giving you a chance to make them a fan of your brand. They saw something in you they already liked, and signed up for more.

You have the opportunity to deliver value and, lest we forget, generate revenue.

So first, make sure you’re using list segmentation so you can define customer groups.

This ensures you send more personalized messages based on your customer type, how customers interacted with your brand, and why they provided their email addresses in the first place.

Getting going

So how often should you be sending emails to your customers?

The answer is: more often than you think.

According to HubSpot, companies that sent between 16 and 30 campaigns (segmented, targeted, individual emails) per month got the best response, enjoying a click rate more than 2 times greater than that of companies that sent 2 or fewer campaigns per month.

At this frequency, companies showed a median open rate of 32.4% and a median click rate of 6.5%, with diminishing returns after 30 emails per month.

This frequency, of course, requires a dedicated focus on consistent content creation.

Getting better

You can deliver more value in your email marketing with these 4 strategies for better quality, user experience, and consistency:

1. Educate: Financial services and education industry emails already enjoy decent open rates and low unsubscribe rates. There is likely no better strategy than to combine both finance and education in your email campaigns.
2. Know your customer journey: Create content that is in sync with your customer journey so you can anticipate what to send and when. Orient your topics and cadence around your marketing funnel for higher open and click-through rates and fewer unsubscribes.
3. Give them options: Let customers tell you the types of email they want to receive. You can present them with a “content only” option, an “events only” option, a “company news” option, or a combination of all three.
4. Give up control: Allow customers to decide the amount of email they want by offering your regular email cadence as well as a monthly “digest” that recaps the posts you’ve made through the month.

While one tangible result of a healthy email strategy is increased sales, there are other intangibles to consider, namely, goodwill and trust — the foundation of customers who look forward to your emails.

Today, the money isn’t just in the list, it’s a result of the relationship you develop with your list. These tips can help you establish a great relationship with your subscribers.