How many emails should you send a week? If you send newsletters, automation emails, sales emails and any other type of email campaign to your customers, or for your customers. How many emails should you be sending a week?
Email spam is a massive problem in the online business and Internet marketing space. With the new GDPR Legislation coming into play for the United Kingdom, it’s an interesting question to ask “how much is too much?”
I remember talking with a customer and going through their email list of around 100,000 email subscribers. At the time, they weren’t doing any outbound email marketing at all. Their email list was actually larger than that, but this was a list of 100,000 people who had at some point been relatively active, or at least visited their website.
So I knew that this list of people would have a chance at opening the emails that we send them. I knew that we had to start emailing this list immediately.
Now before you throw up your arms and head to the comments section, saying “I don’t have an email list of a hundred thousand people Mike”, the principles that I’m about to go over for sending emails are applicable, if you have 10 people on your email list or 10 million.
I outlined a fairly basic plan for beginning to email our current email list. You can see a basic outline of it below.
- Book a training webinar for a low hanging fruit topic.
- Send email promoting webinar on Monday.
- Industry news and round up email on Tuesday.
- Reminder email about webinar on Wednesday.
- Promote one new piece of blog content via email on Thursday
- Product promotion email on Friday.
This plan didn’t include any email automation or content silos that we were setting up as well. A lot of the marketing team were hesitant to send this many emails. The reason?
“We don’t want people to unsubscribe.”
I understand their hesitation. But I want to go over some of the misconceptions behind unsubscribes, email spam and sending lots of emails.
Never really use it
In total, people could via this new email campaign plan, and the automation receive up to 3 emails a day. This system, we used at the time did allow us to prevent sending emails too many times. For example, it had a rule to say “never send more than three emails.” but I never enforced that.
We build an email list over time and the irony is that most of us never really use it. We never really email out and try to communicate with those customers.
When I was given the objection. “We don’t want people to unsubscribe.” I had to ask, why? Why do you think they’ll unsubscribe? And, why do you not want people to unsubscribe?
It’s interesting because everyone in the marketing team looked at me like I was some kind of moron. “What do you mean ‘why don’t we want people to unsubscribe’?”
their thinking was that this was a list of 100,000 people that were essentially potential customers, or prospects. And they are right to an extent, this is 100,000 people that at some point have expressed an interest in their product. Here’s the truth. So if you’re not regularly emailing these people anyway, there never been a convert to a customer. If people AREN’T interested in your products. Then surely you don’t want to be emailing them?
We treat email subscribers like a scarce commodity. The idea is that we should be collecting them and hoarding them. If we email them too much, then our list number will go down and somehow the world will end.
Of course, this isn’t true. I only want people on my list, who I know are going to be highly engaged and open and read my emails. The more people who unsubscribe from my list because they don’t think I’m suitable for them, the better.
On top of all that, there are so many dead and spam email addresses enlists anyway, that I want to unsubscribe them on automation.
“Why would they unsubscribe?”
In answer to the second question, “why would they unsubscribe?” Their reasoning was based around the same scarcity mentality. If you email people to often they’ll get annoyed, and though unsubscribe from you. It would be the equivalent of hassling someone so much who might end up potentially becoming a sale.
At the time I didn’t have enough energy to promote my “abundance” mindset. If you start treating customers like a scarce resource, then they’ll become one. If you start treating them like an abundant resource, then you’ll find more than you could ever want. However, I didn’t have the time or energy to change their entire philosophy and way of thinking around this subject.
Instead, I asked them to explain why they would get annoyed if they received an email every day from us.
“Well, they’ll see it as spam, won’t they? If we email them all the time about ourselves, they’ll see that as spam and unsubscribe.”
My reply was “OK. Are you planning on sending spam?”
“Of course not. But we also need to balance the amount of communication we give them.”
This thinking is the most fundamentally misunderstood aspect of email marketing. The idea that you can communicate with someone “too much”, is a perverse understanding of what spam is in comparison to emails and communication.
If I emailed to you every hour on the hour and whenever you open that email, you had $1 put into your bank account. I guarantee you, that you wouldn’t be able to wait for the next email. You’d never unsubscribe, you’d never give me a spam complaint, and you’d even make time to go and find those emails to be able to open them up.
If I emailed you once an hour, and every time you opened them, you had $1 put into your bank – you would consider that the most valuable email in your account.
And I guarantee you, you would have more emails from me than anyone else.
If I emailed you once a month with a spam me cold call style sales email. Asking if I could have half an hour of your time to talk to you about our offerings. You’d be annoyed after one email. You would unsubscribe from that list after one email.
Give valuable content
When asking yourself, “how many emails a day, should I send?”
Think about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit. Their entire business model is based on pumping too much content out into your feed. We now have to do limit our time on many social media platforms, because there is so much content being put out in front of us.
Some of my favourite influences and marketing rockstar’s (Grant Cardone, Ryan Dyce, Mariah Coz, Sean Mies,, to name a few) Push out social media and email content regularly. My sales coach, Sean, emails me several times a day.
I’m not going unsubscribe from any of these lists and social media feeds BECAUSE I get so much value from their content.
People want lots of content. People also want lots of GREAT content.
The emails that you send every single day, so five times a week, does each one of them provide at least one dollar worth of value?
Personally, I think Mariah Coz’s Emails are some of the best written in the business. My friend and colleague Troy Dean has some amazing story based emails that come out, which I still read despite working with him at WP Elevation.
If you’re afraid of people unsubscribing from your email list, have a real, think about what it is you’re sending them. If you are planning on sending them spam, then of course there are going to unsubscribe.
If you’re planning on sending them the best possible content that you can, then why would they unsubscribe? That’s like saying that “this book has been going on for 400 pages and I’ve got another hundred to go. That’s too many. I’m going to stop reading it.”
Start thinking about your email list is a list of people who are hungry for help and information. Of course, if you do nothing but just try and sell to them. Then they won’t be that interested. Instead do exactly what you are supposed to do and actually COMMUNICATE with them. Tell them stories, ask them questions, offer them advice and tell them how you can help.
In summary, you could send 500 emails a week and assuming your content is high quality enough your unsubscribe rate would be low.
What do you think your customers want to talk about and hear about in their email inbox? Let me know in the comments box below.
