How Often Should You Send Automated Marketing Emails?
Confused about how to grow your business with email marketing automation?
Have you ever wondered if you’re bombarding your subscribers with too many or too few emails?
Clients often ask us how frequently they should send out automated marketing emails, so we complied our top email automation tips for you to get a better sense of how to communicate with your subscribers like a pro.
Our First Email Nurturing Sequence…
We wrote our first nurturing email campaign around seven years ago. After sitting through enough online marketing courses, we knew that we needed to learn how to do it and start building our list ASAP. We’d never really sent out marketing emails before and we were clearly terrified because we didn’t know what we were doing.
Our first nurturing emails were dry and boring… and LONG. Then we moved on to monthly themed emails. The emails got shorter and our writing got better. Over the years we’d even meet people who’d say ‘I love your emails’ and ‘I feel like I know you guys!’ We were stoked to connect with so many people and gain the confidence to show off even more of ourselves.
What Is Email Nurturing?
Email nurturing is an important part of the sales funnel process. We like to refer to email marketing automation as “email nurturing” because we believe there is a formula for success to grow your business with email marketing.
Email nurturing convinces your lead to move further down the sales funnel and towards a higher-paid service. Email nurturing does this by keeping the lead engaged.
As soon as the lead converts, they are automatically moved out of the sequence and onto the next email nurturing campaign.
A standard email nurturing sequence typically consists of 3-5 emails sent over a 2-3 week period and refers to the original piece of content that caused the conversion, aka your lead magnet.
Why Email Nurturing Works
Automated email campaigns are used by just about every brand today for two BIG reasons:
- Email nurturing delivers relevant content to the right individual at the right time.
- Email nurturing saves time and assists in the creative input of your marketing team.
Email Nurturing Types
There are many different sequence options out there. They can happen at any point of the sales funnel. Some examples are:
- Stories that help build a connection
- Case studies that help build credibility
- Free offers to warm up cold lists
- Paid offers to drive sales home
How Often Should You Email?
Some send out emails every day ‒ others strategically stagger delivery. Sending emails too often can feel intrusive and may bother your subscribers. On the other hand if you don’t send out emails often enough, your subscribers and new potential leads might find another solution to their problem before you get to them. We’ve found that sometimes fewer emails delivered over a longer period of time can provide more value to your subscribers.
Email nurturing allows you to continue to keep your brand “top of mind” with relevant messages to make sure you engage your leads at exactly the right time.
Our automated sequence usually runs over a three-week period, in this order:
- The first email is sent out one day after the lead magnet success email
- The second, two days after the previous email
- The third, three days after the previous email
- The fourth, five days after the previous email
- The fifth, eight days after the previous email
The Fibonacci sequence is regarded as the ideal timing for value-add nurturing sequences. The numbers are determined by adding up the two previous numbers. For example, starting with 0 and 1, the sequence goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on.
tl;dr
5 Things To Keep In Mind When Building An Email Sequence
- Make it look like a personal text email
- Use their first name throughout
- Don’t be spammy
- Use Fibonacci numbers for frequency
- Keep images to a minimum
