How Often Should You Publish Your Newsletter?

You are currently viewing How Often Should You Publish Your Newsletter?

Writing a newsletter is one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with your audiences, who you’ve built out over the years after struggling. However, when to publish a newsletter is another question altogether.

A newsletter’s goal is to keep your audiences in the loop about possible product changes, updates, and general information. It also increases visibility, enhances brand awareness, and ensures your audience doesn’t forget about you after they’re done shopping.

Your blogs educate and enlighten your readers, and they keep things interesting. There are three components to an effective newsletter: i) sending regular updates, ii) sharing information such as tips and tricks, and iii) creating promos- this is where you will be making a sale.

Your goal should be to send a few helpful tidbits and then sneaking in a promo email once in a while. It’s practical, gets the job done, and doesn’t annoy your customers.

But this also raises an important question: how often should you send out a newsletter?

There is no cookie-cutter approach rule on how often you should send newsletters. The exact number depends on your audience and what they expect from you. This could be twice a month for some businesses when they have accumulated a decent amount of blogs to send out.

The rules of engagement are a little different for newsletters, and it may involve sending several emails in a single day without annoying the receiver. Of course, this is only possible if the newsletter contains many promo campaigns that customers can use to secure discounts with each purchase.

What Is the Right Frequency for Me?

When you’re not publishing a newsletter a certain minimum number of times, you are all but guaranteed to be forgotten. To stay relevant, you have to increase the frequency to about once a week. To arrive at the right number, you have to understand the psychology of email newsletters.

It’s good to take cues from popular hard-copy magazines like People and Game Informer. They usually send out newsletters once a month. Increase the frequency, and you end up affecting the thrills that customers get by reading your email. Reduce the rate, and they will soon forget about you.

But the thing about People Magazine and Game Informer Magazine is that they almost always have a wealth of content to share, which keeps things interesting.

If you don’t have a fully fleshed-out content strategy for your newsletter and prefer to drip feed the same rehashed stuff throughout the year, maybe you’re not ready for a newsletter yet. As a general rule of thumb, the more content you create, the higher you can send frequent newsletters.

Twice a Month

For most small and medium-sized businesses, the right timing is to send newsletters twice a month on a scheduled day. The newsletter should typically have around 500 to 1000 words of informative content, helpful resources, and a few promos thrown in for good measure.

This first newsletter should provide you with an idea of what to do next. If the ROI stays redundant, consider increasing the frequency to once a week or two weeks. This is best done if you provide a teaser for a new product and then provide a follow-up email the next week during a product launch.

If it generates interest, consider peppering in 2 or even 3 newsletters a week. It all depends on how your audience reacts. Most companies do this by sending a promo email, followed by something informative with no promotional offers, and then following it up with a discount coupon.

Are Newsletters Even Relevant?

The answer is a resounding yes because the raw data is in favor of newsletters. According to a 2015 survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa, 61% of subscribers expected to see at least one email per week from companies that they followed. This is true for B2B brands because they can leverage the power of weekly and monthly newsletters to keep their reader base informed about new products.

The same survey concluded that 86% of readers expected to receive promo emails at least once a month. 15% of the respondents claimed that they wanted to receive promo emails every single day. This sounds very promising for your ROI, and you could secure more sales if you stay on top of customer expectations!

How to Find the Best Time of the Day

If you’re unsure when your audiences are most active and no one’s opening your newsletter, try using several analytical tools. The best part about newsletters is that you can tell when someone has viewed them, who has clicked on any of the links, if there is a noticeable change in website traffic, and if they are sharing your content with anyone else.

The best way to arrive at an excellent time to send your newsletter is to find out their Open rate. If the open email rate is zero and hasn’t picked up, consider changing the time of day when you send emails. The open rate depends on many factors, including the subject line, relevancy of the subject for your subscribers, and of course, the time of day.

According to Mailchimp, the day’s optimal hour is 10 AM in the readers’ time zones. Unless you have your reasons, it would be unwise to send the email too early, say 2 or 3 AM. Most people are usually asleep.

What are the Best Days to Send out an Email?

The answer to this question depends on how active your audiences are with their emails. For instance, most people will actively check their email between Mondays through Fridays because of work-related reasons. They pay attention to Wednesdays. If you’re running into budgetary issues, consider dropping Monday and Friday out of the newsletter schedule.

This is because most people are still catching up from the weekend on the following Monday and may not have the time to open your email. Fridays are when they’re gearing up for weekend mode and often stay away from anything that even remotely reminds them of work – emails included.

Sundays, however, are great days for a newsletter. It’s when everyone is chatting with friends and family, doing some online shopping (often preceding this by fishing for discount codes), checking out reviews, and doing a lot of research. This is where your newsletter comes in.

There’s a general strategy you can always follow to see if it works for you, but the best day depends on what works best for you. The recipe for a successful newsletter goes a bit like this:

  • Day 1: informational blog
  • Day 2: Promo campaign
  • Day 3: Discount codes or rest

The trick is to be very consistent.

Why is Consistency so Important

Consistency is key to your newsletter’s success. Let’s explore this from a different perspective. Suppose you subscribed to a newspaper for delivery on Saturdays. So one Saturday morning, you walk out of your room to the driveway in mild anticipation of the news. Only, it’s not there. It does arrive, but on the following Sunday instead. You write this down as a one-off and hope things improve from here on out.

But the inconsistent behavior continues the next week, and this time, the paper arrives on a Wednesday instead. As a coping mechanism from this haphazard pattern, you drop all your expectations of the article entirely. It just isn’t valuable to you as a subscriber anymore.

The same applies to your readers. They will only see your newsletter as a valuable resource if you publish it consistently. This means finding the right time of the week and day and sticking to the delivery schedule at any cost.

It’s okay to change the newsletter’s publishing pattern when you’re still figuring out your subscribers’ reading behavior. But we feel that anything less than one month a day will not keep your readers engaged long enough. The bottom line is simple: if you choose an irregular publication schedule, you will receive random and unpredictable results. This could hinder your newsletter’s success ratio. To grow and maintain your newsletter, you have to publish it on a consistent and frequent basis.


About Author: As a content marketing specialist at a content writing service, Dave Brown and his Content Development Pros team have helped small and large businesses get results through content. He’s worked with various Fortune 500 companies on their newsletter and content strategy. When he’s not busy with all things digital marketing, Dave can be found watching Netflix or chilling at the beach.

How Often Should You Publish Your Newsletter?

SEO Mountain View – Local SEO Packages

eCommerce FAQs

Passionate advocate for digital inclusivity, leading the charge at Understanding eCommerce to provide web accessibility solutions for businesses and organizations. Committed to making the online world accessible to all.