Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses

How Often Should You Email Your List? The Truth About Frequency

• Gary Redmond • Season 2 • Episode 3

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Unlock the secrets to skyrocketing your business growth by mastering the art of email marketing frequency with Gary Redmond on Unbox the Inbox. 

Get a FREE email writing course for coaches at www.inboxcashmachine.com/free-training

Discover why the age-old belief that frequent emailing annoys subscribers might just be holding you back. With insights drawn from Gary's personal journey at BusterBox, learn how shifting from a few emails a week to a daily—and even twice daily—routine drastically reduced customer acquisition costs and boosted sales.

You'll get the truth behind the myths and misconceptions surrounding email frequency and find out how leveraging your email list more effectively can transform your sales strategy.

In this episode, we explore the crucial question of whether email frequency in marketing is better more often than less.

• Addressing common misconceptions about email frequency 
• Insights from BusterBox's experience with email marketing 
• Importance of consistent communication for engagement 
• Overcoming the fear of unsubscribes 
• Techniques for generating engaging email content 
• Structuring emails for maximal impact 
• Encouragement to implement frequent emailing strategies for better results.

Email me at gary@garyredmond.net

  • Please suggest any topic you would like me to cover by visiting unboxtheinbox.com
  • Join my newsletter at garyredmond.com/newsletter


Speaker 1:

Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your online business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. So the topic of today's episode is around frequency. Okay, so how often should you email your list? This might be a question that you've had on your mind or you've heard different misconceptions and myths over the years about how often you should email people, and it's also something that comes up. Comes up a lot with newbies or people who are unfamiliar with email marketing, and usually they're afraid of emailing their list, to be totally honest with you, and they're emailing a lot less often than they should be and they're afraid to increase their email frequency. Okay, so, like you, might have fears, like you know, will they annoy my list? Should I do it daily, weekly, or only when I have something to sell or something to say? So by the end of this episode, you're going to know exactly how often to email your list and why. The answer is simpler than you think okay, um, before I dive into the episode, I want to talk to you about a little story that's been happening to us, or happened to us towards again in 2024, um, in my um first business, which is buster box. Okay, so we also even though we had been a pretty aggressive email emailing company, like we would email maybe, uh, three days per week, so monday, wednesday, friday, and we would also do a resend on tuesday, wed, tuesday, thursday, saturday. Okay, so on the alternate days, we would basically send an email on monday and we resend it to non openers on tuesday, then we do a new email to the entire list on wednesday and then resend it to non-openers on thursday, and then the same a new, new email on friday and resend it to non-openers on Thursday, and then the same new email on Friday and resend it to non-openers on Saturday. So if you don't open every, oh, if you don't open our email on the day that we send this to the entire list, we'll resend this to you again the next day. So there were people receiving six emails from us per week and if they opened it, obviously on Monday or Wednesday or whatever, they wouldn't get it the following day. If they buy they'll, they'll be removed from the, from the blast list, from the, from the broadcast list and they'll move to our customer list, so they won't get any sales emails again. Okay, but that's kind of.

Speaker 1:

We thought we were being aggressive, to be honest with you, um, and what happened was towards the end of 2024, september to de. We just noticed in the market that, after being quite challenging for pretty much a year in the UK market for our business our subscription box business we noticed that there seemed to be an opportunity to increase spend and to basically acquire more customers. So we started to increase our spend. But one thing that we noticed, and something that we always failed to do in the past, um, was that when we increase spend in the past, our customer acquisition cost would rise because, as you spend more on ads, like, your email list is always going to supplement your, your sales from your, from your, like um, your ads or whatever you're doing to generate traffic to your website. Okay, your email is your backup plan. Okay.

Speaker 1:

What we notice is, if you increase spend, there's a lag time between when people actually join your email list and then they buy. These are the people who are not ready to buy right away. So if you increase your spend for one, two, three weeks, you're not going to get. You know. You're going to get an increase of people joining your list, but the list previous to those new people joining is still the same size. So what I'm saying is the customer acquisition cost can rise because the email sales don't catch up with it right away.

Speaker 1:

So what we started to do was we noticed that the customer acquisition cost was rising and right around the time that we decided to spend more money was when we started to email more frequently. So first we went to an email every single day to the entire list, and then we actually started to go to two emails per day, one in the morning and one in the evening. And this is actually one of the biggest game changers that we found, for when you're in a growth phase in your business, when you're trying to grow, and when you're spending more, if your acquisition cost starts to rise, or anytime your acquisition cost is really high, your email list should be the way, one of the most easy levers, you can pull to bring that back in line. So email frequency was one of the biggest things that we changed and it made a massive difference to the amount of customers we got and also the cost it was to acquire those customers. So, from a person and a brand and a company that thought they were already pretty aggressive turns out, you can go more aggressive again. Okay, so if you are emailing once a week or once a month or something, I guarantee you're leaving many, many, many amount of sales on the table.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so now I wanna talk a little bit about some myths about email frequency. Okay, so, number one emailing too much will make people unsubscribe. Okay, Like, to be honest with you, I don't know how many people don't subscribe from my lists and I actually don't care, because whether that's my coaching business or whether that's a buster box, we literally don't even look. We don't even care because, like, people don't subscribe for many different reasons. Maybe it's because of the email, maybe it's because of the content, maybe they're just not interested. Okay, but your email list doesn't exist for you to keep friends on your list and send them things and, and you know, entertain them. Okay, like, people unsubscribe for lots of different reasons and if they unsubscribe, well, they were never going to buy anyway, you know. So there is no, there's not really a metric that I care less about than unsubscribe rate.

Speaker 1:

Of course, if there's something that you know, you're getting some feedback from people, um, you know, of course, take that feedback on board. But people who are, you know, overly obsessed with their own subscribe rate or get kind of take it as a personal attack or a personal um, they take it personally. If people don't subscribe, it's probably not because of your how often you're emailing or not, okay, um. So, number two, I should only email when I have something to sell, I mean the. What I would say to that is you should always have something to sell, okay, whether you're, whether you're a coaching business or whether you're, whether you're a coach, whether you're, you know, an e-commerce business, whether you're in software, whatever it is, you should have something to sell at all times, okay, um, obviously, building, building building consistency with your email strategy will help to build trust and relationships. But, like, if you structure and I'll talk about this later on in this episode but if you structure your emails in the correct way, you can still give value and give insight while still making offers. Okay, particularly in the coaching niche, you, by structuring your email in the way that you know, highlights a problem that your potential customer may be having, and then you offer them a bridge or a solution that you know is the next logical step for when they finish your email.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's say, you know, are you struggling with high customer acquisition costs? This is the way that I've found to reduce acquisition costs. Just use the example from this podcast episode if I was to write an email about it. Okay, acquisition costs. Just use the example from this podcast episode if I was to write an email about it. Previously, I had a really high acquisition cost. These are the steps I took to reduce it. I started to email more frequently, I stopped worrying about when people are unsubscribing and, in the end, I managed to bring my acquisition costs back down in line and grow my business.

Speaker 1:

If you would like more help with your email strategy, click here, book a call, be replied to this email or buy this product. Okay, so you know, by you're still giving value, you're still highlighting a problem that they may be having or something that may be going on in their business. You're giving them a solution, or at least you're giving them insight into the solution that you found and you're offering them more help. Okay, and that way you can continue to email without you know you're not going to send, oh, buy this, buy this, buy this over and over again. It's, it's a specific framework, okay, so.

Speaker 1:

The third myth is I don't have enough to say Okay. So when you start to write emails regularly, particularly if you start to come up to the level of daily emails okay, if you're a coach or a consultant obviously if you're, if you're a, if you're an e-commerce business, you're going to be rotating your offers and you're going to be making different offers to your customers every day. Whether you're a shop or a subscription or whatever it is, there is some skill involved in terms of reframing your offers. And if you're a coach, I mean you can talk about anything that's going on in your daily life. So if you're talking about your daily work, your client wins. Anything that's in your challenges or something that you've recently overcome all of these can be turned into an email. Okay, even you know your to-do list. Okay, if you look on your to-do list and you ask yourself why am I doing this? And you should be able to figure out a way that you can tell a story around your, your sort of story that you can write in an email. Okay, so you shouldn't really ever run out of things to say you should, only you should always have something to sell and you shouldn't worry about people unsubscribing if you email too much, okay. So those are the three myths.

Speaker 1:

So now I want to talk about how often should you actually email, okay? And my answer is more is better than less, okay, so what I do is I in BusterBox now as well. We still send a daily email, if not two, certainly one every day. Okay, because it simply just gets us more sales than if we don't send it once a day. Okay, that's really it.

Speaker 1:

In my coaching business, I also send one email per day, and the reason is like people don't open all of your emails anyway. And the reality is people don't care. Most people don't even look. I don't even notice whether someone has emailed me today or yesterday or it's been every day for the last year. Like I don't really even. Like you're living your own life and I presume you are too, so like if anybody does get upset, they'll just unsubscribe, okay, but if you're only sending one email per week and it gets opened by even 30 to 40% of your list, which would be a great open rate, that's one chance for 40% of the people to see your email, whereas if you email every day, different people will see your emails and engage with you. So you're giving yourself more opportunities to make offers and make sales.

Speaker 1:

Okay. Now, if you can commit to daily, then the consistency beats sort of inspiration. Okay, so stay consistent. Whether it's three times a week, twice a week or whatever, I would still recommend daily, even if it's five days per week, that's what you want to maintain. Okay, because, again, stopping and starting hurts your sales more than emailing too much. And then the longer you leave it, you know you have to get the feeling that you have to sort of reintroduce yourself to your list. Okay, which is not something I also recommend either. Like, people probably haven't noticed that you haven't emailed them, you know.

Speaker 1:

But, as I said, the benefits to this are, like, you simply get a chance to make more offers and you make more offers, you make more sales. Okay, and you know you're the people who do want to hear from you, want to from you often, and people just generally don't take action the first time they see or hear an offer. It takes many, many repetitions of something in order to get people to buy. Another benefit to frequent emailing is it actually makes the writing process easier. The more you do it, the better, and the faster you actually get at writing emails, and it becomes more and more important If you want to sell your offers, if you want to do all the things you mentioned before about getting better at telling stories and creating offers, then you know, the better, the more you email, the better you're gonna get, and so I just want to give you some tips here and to help you to make frequent emails without burnout.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so the first thing is really just to lower the pressure. Okay, you're just writing an email. Okay, my emails for my coaching business don't have any images or anything fancy. It's really just text. So it doesn't need to be a masterpiece. A simple story or insight is enough. The second tip is to use sort of sawdust content. What does that mean? It means when you're in a workshop, or if you think about someone who's a carpenter, when they're doing their work, they're cutting wood, they're making a masterpiece, okay, but on the floor of the workshop there's also sawdust. So when you're in your daily work and you're coaching clients or you're selling your products, usually you're going to end up with daily experiences, client results, or even you can use some of your past emails or social media posts that work well and you can repurpose those things. So really, a good tip is when something comes into your mind like an experience or an epiphany.

Speaker 1:

I have a notes app that I have Apple Notes. It's on my phone and it's on my computer, so it's kind of synced. This is good. So I just have like a, basically a note. That's like content, ideas or email ideas and anything like something that comes into my head. It's like, oh, like I just realized something there and I'm gonna write that down. So, for example, one of the most one of the things I might do my next podcast episode about is the fact that email marketing kind of like I touched on today, it's it's a secret weapon to reduce your customer acquisition cost, but it doesn't. It's one of those background things that a lot of people forget to do. Anyway, I'll come back to that in the next week probably. It's okay.

Speaker 1:

So another thing you can do on top of lowering the pressure and not worrying about being masterpiece and also using sawdust content is batch writing Okay. So even if you can write two to three emails in one day, again you can use a very similar email but have a slightly different angle on it. You know, I've done that before where you know you might, you know, use an email and, like you can use the same sort of idea you know and write about it in a slightly different way. So you can write about it as a result, or write about it as an epiphany or an idea or a problem. Okay, and the final thing is to just have a very simple structure. Okay, so if you go to inboxcashmachinecom, forward slash free hyphen training, you can download my free training and walk through on how I create emails that have a very simple framework which is just an open loop intro. It's going to have a story and it's going to have a transition and it's going to have a call to action. Okay, and it's a simple framework that you can use to basically grab people's attention, tell them a story and make them an offer. Okay, that's pretty much the only structure your emails need to have. Okay, more relevant for coaching businesses, but it is also an interesting framework to use, no matter what you're trying to sell.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so, for email frequency, those are my thoughts. Okay. So, like, let's recap more frequency equals more sales, trust and engagement. An action step for you guys is to try an email more often and see what happens. Okay, just try it for even 14 or 30 days. Try and send an email a day and see what happens with your engagement. Okay, if you want any more help with this or you want to get in touch with me, you can find me in my find me at gary, at garyrebbennet, or my Facebook group, or whatever you want to find me online. Okay, so that is it for this week's episode. I hope this was helpful. I hope you got some insights into email frequency. And, yeah, don't be afraid to email. Really, there's very little downside to emailing regularly and there's usually a whole lot of upside.

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Gary Redmond

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