Email Frequency for a Business With Little New to Say

Two ways to get it wrong

One business emails every Tuesday because a marketing plan once said weekly. Most weeks it repeats the previous offer under a new subject line, and the list has learned to delete it unopened.

Another sends one email a year, in December, to addresses collected over three years. Many of the people on it no longer remember signing up.

Both started from a frequency rather than from what there was to say. The weekly sender ran out of news by the second month; the yearly sender had news all year and never sent it.

The right schedule sits between them, and it can be worked out from the business's own calendar.

What an empty weekly email costs

Each empty email teaches the reader that the next one will be empty too. Opening becomes deleting, and deleting eventually becomes unsubscribing.

Some readers press the spam button instead of unsubscribing, because it is closer to hand. Mailbox providers count those complaints, and enough of them push later emails toward spam for the whole list.

In Gmail, newsletters usually land in the Promotions tab already, and a sender people have learned to ignore there goes unnoticed when it finally has something to say.

What a yearly email costs

The rare sender has the opposite problem. A year is long enough for people to forget the sign-up, change jobs, abandon an address or move away.

The first email after a long silence draws complaints from people who no longer recognise the name, and bounces from addresses that have died. Both count against the sender.

If the list was built from purchases rather than sign-ups, check consent too. Under CASL, a sale gives you implied consent that runs out two years after the purchase, and further emails do not stretch it.

Count the news you actually had

Go back through last year and list everything a customer would genuinely have wanted to hear.

• New products or services, including ones that came back.
• Price changes, up or down.
• Seasonal availability, the things that come and go.
• Changes to hours, holidays and closures.
• Events, markets, open days and classes.
• Where to find you, if that changed.

The fourth is the one most often left off the count, and the kind of email almost nobody resents: short, useful, and about something they might otherwise get wrong.

Set the frequency from the count

Four real items in a year suggests a quarterly email. Twelve suggests monthly. Fifty suggests the business is busier than it thinks.

Most quiet businesses land at monthly or every second month: often enough to be remembered, rare enough that each email can carry something real.

Pick a day and keep to it, such as the first Thursday of the month. Regularity is what lets people recognise the email before they open it.

Below about four emails a year, a list starts to forget who you are. Treat once a season as the floor, even in a quiet year.

A worked example

A tofu maker with a small production kitchen in an industrial unit sells at three farmers' markets and to a few independent grocers. Most of its list was collected on paper at the market stall.

For one summer it emailed weekly, as a marketing course had advised. Every email carried the same market schedule and a photograph of the same block of tofu, because nothing else had changed.

Unsubscribes arrived weekly, and a few people reported the emails as spam. Then the markets closed, the emails stopped for the winter, and the first one in spring drew complaints from people who had forgotten the stall.

The product does not change from week to week, so a weekly schedule could only be filled with repetition, and four silent months were long enough to be forgotten.

It now sends one email on the first Thursday of every month, all year: the month's markets or, in winter, the grocers that stock it, one seasonal recipe, and a line on anything new.

A smoked tofu added in the fall got its own short email the week it arrived. That was the only extra send of the year.

What to send when nothing is new

A quiet month still has something useful in it, if the email is about the customer rather than the business.

A seasonal reminder: what to do now, before the rush, or what to order before a holiday. An answer to a question customers ask at the counter every week, written out once.

How something is made or chosen, in a few sentences and one photograph. A customer's use of the product, with their permission. A reminder of a service people forget you offer.

Each of these is new to the reader even when nothing at the business has changed.

One thing per email

An email with little to say should say it briefly: one item, a few sentences, one link.

Padding a quiet email with stock photographs and a row of social icons makes it look busier, not more useful, and readers can tell.

A short email read to the end does more for the next one than a long email deleted at the subject line.

News between issues

A fixed schedule is a floor, not a ceiling. When something genuinely new happens, such as a product, a closure or a move, send it on its own.

Keep those extra sends rare and plainly worth it. If extras start arriving every week, the schedule has quietly become weekly, and the list will treat it that way.

The counter-case

Some businesses do have weekly news. A shop with constant new stock, a restaurant with a changing menu or a venue with weekly events can send weekly, because each email is different.

Receipts, booking confirmations and reminders are a separate matter. They are expected and wanted, and they do not count toward the schedule.

And a business that has not emailed its list in years, but still holds its subscribers' consent, may be better starting with one honest email asking whether people still want to hear from it.

For everyone else, the schedule comes from the news, with a floor of once a season and one useful thing in every send.

The check

1. List last year's real news by month.
2. Count it and set the frequency from that.
3. Choose a fixed day and keep to it.
4. Keep a floor of once a season.
5. Write down five useful topics for quiet months.
6. Send one item per email.
7. Check consent on any list built from purchases.

Step five is what makes the schedule survivable. A business that decides in advance what a quiet month's email will say does not end up resending last week's offer with a new subject line.

Saying how often you will write, before anyone subscribes, is covered in the sign-up form that promises nothing.

Frequently asked questions

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