How Often Should You Email? (It’s More Than You Think)

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.”

While our marketing focus tends to skew digital these days, financial content marketers still want to know:

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.

Get Real

The most important thing to remember about your email list is that they subscribed because they wanted to hear from you. They’re giving you a chance to make them fans of your brand – they saw something in you they already liked and signed up for more.

With a little effort, you can both deliver value and 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 have interacted with your brand, and why they provided their email addresses in the first place.

Get 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.

10 Ways to Keep Email Fresh

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

1. Educate effectively: Financial services and education industry emails already enjoy decent open rates and low unsubscribe rates. There is likely no better content format than finance and education.

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 emails 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 and a monthly “digest” that recaps the posts you’ve made through the month.

5. Import dynamic content: Integrate dynamic content that adjusts based on the recipient’s behavior or profile to make each email feel uniquely tailored.

6. Add interactive elements: Include interactive elements like polls, surveys, or clickable quizzes to transform passive readers into active participants.

7. Get user-generated content: Feature user-generated content to foster a sense of community and to show real-life applications of your products or services.

8. Create a series: Establish a regular content series to provide consistent value and give subscribers something to look forward to in every email.

9. Refresh the visuals: Periodically update the visual design of your emails to reflect seasonal changes or freshen up the look, keeping the aesthetic engaging and modern.

10. Preview what’s next: At the end of each email, tease what’s coming next. Whether it’s a hint about an upcoming deal, a sneak peek at a new blog post, or an engaging question, this builds anticipation and keeps subscribers eager for more.

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

Reach out to the Vested team for any questions on email marketing – we’re here to help!