Should My Store Send Daily Emails?

Email marketing is great – there’s no doubt about it.

It’s easier to use, more cost effective, more personal and converts better than other marketing channels.

But you can always have too much of a good thing. Sending out newsletters to your email list everyday is definitely not something we recommend.

So to answer the question posed in the title of this blog post – should your store send daily emails?

Here’s why:

You don’t need to send every day

I can’t really think of a situation that would warrant you sending emails every day. Even if you’re continually introducing new products on your store, that happen to be 100% relevant to every member of your email list, there really isn’t any reason you should be sending out daily emails.

Most likely, this isn’t the case for your store. Chances are that you’re going to run out of fresh content, so that you’ll end up just showing everybody things that they’ve already seen. You should hold off until you have something really special to share, like a sale or a great new product.

Your emails will end up in the spam folder

Most stores start sending daily when they see the sales they can generate in each email while their deliverability is high. However that sales boost is always short lived and will likely cause long term deliverability issues for your store, for two reasons.

Firstly, your deliverability will drop because people will start marking your emails as spam. The top reason consumers mark promotional emails as spam is because the subscriber receives too many of them, or because the content of these emails is irrelevant.

Source

Having your emails marked as spam is only going to do bad things for your domain reputation and your email deliverability rates.

Secondly, unopened emails will build up in inboxes, and ISPs will begin sending your emails right to people’s spam folders. Not everyone is going to open every email you send them; there will always be unopened emails left in inboxes. However, as you send emails out more and more frequently, the number of these unopened emails will also increase.

ISPs like Gmail will take this as a sign that your subscriber (and other future subscribers) aren’t interested in receiving your emails, so will start automatically sending your emails to your subscribers’ spam folders without them having to mark it as spam. All the time and money spent acquiring new leads and sending emails will have been for nothing.

Your open rate will drop

Aside from meaning that your emails are sent to your subscribers’ spam folders, your declining open rate also means that you’re naturally going to see fewer conversions from your emails. If less people open your emails, less people will be seeing your great content and products, and eventually clicking through and making orders from your store.

To prove our point, we looked at a few of the stores that send out emails every day to their subscribers. We found that their open rate rapidly declined over time.

Stores that sent daily through SmartrMail saw on average a decline of almost 55% in their open rate over time. One store’s open rate fell by almost 78%.

A decrease in emails being opened by subscribers will naturally result in a lower click through rate and lower conversion rate. Daily emails led to an average decline of almost 56% in click through rate and 52% in revenue for the stores that emailed their subscribers every day with SmartrMail.

Alternately, people (myself included) don’t like having their inboxes clogged up. Because I receive so many superfluous promotional emails everyday, I’m not going to read every single one of them, but I don’t want to have a bunch of unopened emails sitting in my inbox. So I just select all of the unopened newsletters and mark them all as read.

I can guarantee that I’m not the only one that does this. It means that even though your stats suggest that I’m interested in your daily emails, I haven’t actually opened one, let alone read its content and clicked through with the intent to purchase something.

People will unsubscribe

Bottom line: it’s annoying. Would you like receiving daily product emails about yoga pants or moisturising creams? Probably not. Even if your customers really enjoy your products, they’re not going to purchase from your store every single day.

For those who aren’t so engaged with your emails, you risk making them unsubscribe, reducing the likelihood they’ll buy your products again. You’ve worked hard and spent lots of money to acquire your customers and prospects. It would be a shame to have them unsubscribe from your email list.

Sending daily emails is reducing customer lifetime value (or LTV) – the projected amount of revenue you will earn from a customer in your interactions with them. In turn, this lowers your LTV:CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. For a viable business model, you should always aim to keep to a 3:1 ratio – e.g. $300 in revenue generated by $100 in marketing spend.

If the ratio is less than 3:1, you’re spending too much on acquiring new customers and not maximizing customer LTV. Want an easy way to fix that? Stop sending daily!

By sending emails every day to your customers and prospects, you’re shortening their lifetime value with your business; as people unsubscribe from your email list, they’re unlikely to ever buy from your store again. To compensate, you’ll end up spending more and more money to acquire new customers to replace those that you drove away with your daily emails.

The cost of acquiring a new customer is 6 to 7 times more expensive than that of retaining an existing one. Not only this, but returning customers are almost 2 times more likely to convert than new customers. Try to keep your customers around – don’t scare them off by being too trigger happy with your emails.

How often should you send emails then, if not daily?

There’s not really a universal answer. It really depends on your business – specifically the average time between purchases from your store. By analyzing your sales data, you can firstly determine your store’s average purchase frequency, based on total orders and total unique customers.

You can then use this figure to find the average time between purchases over a certain period of time. Your store’s optimal email frequency is dependent on the average time between your customers’ purchases.

Therefore, if your customers buy from you really often, e.g. if you provide a food delivery service or sell fresh produce, it would be okay to send out newsletter more frequently. Even so, we would not recommend sending more than 5 emails per week.

If a customer already purchases from your store several times a week, it isn’t necessary to keep sending them emails, because they clearly already know and love your products. Instead, it would be a good idea to limit your newsletters to when you have exciting new products or offers.

In fact, most Shopify and BigCommerce stores don’t offer e-commerce goods that are frequently purchased; the stores that send out daily emails through SmartrMail all sell material goods that aren’t necessary to purchase often, such as clothing and accessories, pet apparel, and fitness gear. This means that most of you reading this blog post definitely don’t have an excuse to send out emails on a daily basis.

If you do want a magic number, I recommend capping your emails at 2 per week, if your average time between purchases is a month or more.

However, if you want to find your optimal email frequency, read this in-depth guide: Best Practices for Frequency of Email Marketing.

But what if I still want to send daily emails?

If I haven’t managed to dissuade you from sending daily emails yet, and you feel like you still need to send out newsletters to your email list every day for whatever reason, then at least send your subscribers relevant content.

You can easily make sure that the product recommendations in your email newsletters are relevant to your subscribers with SmartrMail. Simply change the settings of your Auto Emails by setting the content mix to only send recommended products.

Keep your content interesting as well. The last thing you want to do is send your customers the same old product recommendations every single day. Even though TeeTurtle sends me a daily newsletter, I can forgive them, because all of their emails showcase new products, delivering on their promise of ‘new designs every day’.

This also makes signing up to your email list more enticing for prospects – I signed up to TeeTurtle’s newsletter knowing that they wouldn’t send me stale and repetitive content, but different T-shirt designs each day.

Even though I like receiving their emails, I don’t have the time to open every single one. It’s more than likely that other don’t either. As unopened emails pile up in our inboxes, the deliverability rate is going to decrease without aggressive list cleaning.

So if you really have to send daily (do you really, though?), make sure you’re continually cleaning your email list of subscribers who have stopped engaging with your emails, in order to keep a good deliverability rate. I would recommend removing any subscribers who haven’t open any email in 30 days, but were added over 30 days ago.

If you’ve sent 30 emails in 30 days to a subscriber, and none have been opened, they probably won’t be opening any subsequent one either.

Or, you know, you could always stop sending them emails every day…

Conclusion

Email marketing is a great tool. You might be tempted to send out emails to your subscribers every day in an effort to drive conversions. However, sending emails in moderations, rather than on a daily basis, is definitely much more effective.

Not only will you reduce the risk of being marked as spam and having people unsubscribe from your email list, but you will find that your conversion rates and customer LTV will also increase. There just isn’t really a need to send daily emails.