How Often Should I Email My Clients?

One of the questions I get asked most often is, “how often should I email my clients?”

And it’s not only a very good question but one which often causes some degree of confusion.

How often do you send emails to your clients?

How often is too regularly?

One per month?

One per week?

Once per day?!

Of course, there is no set answer.  It will depend on many things, primarily based on your own relationship with those to whom you’re emailing.

But the likelihood is, you’re not emailing your clients enough and as a result you’re missing out on sales.

I recently received a series of emails from one of my favourite marketers, Chris Cardell.   The emails were to promote an upcoming one day seminar on business growth which he was running in London.

I received a total of 26 emails from him regarding this seminar.

Yes, 26.

Now I’m not suggesting you email your clients 26 times necessarily but ask yourself why he did that.

My guess is he did so because he probably understands that some people will finally take the plunge and buy a ticket for his seminar upon receiving email number 26.  I have no doubt that he’s run lots of test on those emails to see when people bought, and when they didn’t.

You see, most people won’t read your emails.

According to the most recent data available from email provider MailChimp, in the beauty industry email open rates run at about 19.21%.   That means for every 100 clients you email only 19 of them will open your email.

Ouch!

And that doesn’t even take into consideration those who never receive the emails (those that get stuck in the spam or junk folders, for example) or those who open but never actually read the emails.

So what does this tell you?

Well, it should tell you that you need to send more emails than you do at the moment if you want to get your message heard.

Combine that with these sales statistics from sales training expert Grant Cardone.

Grant says that whilst 48% of people NEVER follow up on a sales enquiry (madness!), a massive 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact!

This means that there is a huge opportunity for more sales which are being missed.

Alarming sales statistics from Grant Cardone

Are you missing out on some of these sales?

There is a good chance that you are.

But what if people get upset and unsubscribe from my emails?

Well in my experience, they probably won’t.

Sure, you might get the odd person who doesn’t like receiving your emails and asks you not to send them any more.

But… wait for it… this is a good thing!

Those are the people who will almost certainly never buy anything from you anyway!   So all they are doing is hurting your percentages.

I’d rather send an email to 50 people who are interested in what I have to say that 5,000 who couldn’t care less.   Wouldn’t you?

So how often should you email?

Well I’d say the answer to that question is as often as you have something interesting to say.

If you’ve a message that you feel your audience would be interested in then you owe it them to share it with them.

But it can’t be all sales, sales, sales.

You should look to educate and entertain most of the time.

By educating and entertaining your audience people will look forward to receiving your emails.  This of course will in turn help your open rates and your response rates.

If you try and sell something on every email you send then you’ll soon have people running for the hills.

You absolutely must email your audience at the very least twice per month and ideally once or twice a week.

It doesn’t have to be an essay every time, but touch base with them.

Keep your name in the forefront of their minds so that when the time comes and they need your service, you are the obvious choice.

That’s the sweet spot, right there.

Go on, go and send one now.