How Often Should You Email Your List? A 2025 Guide

How Often Should You Email Your List? A 2025 Guide

Anyone who manages an email database or works with an email marketing agency knows the tension: send too often and you risk a wave of unsubscribes, but send too rarely and your audience may forget who you are. The right rhythm can transform your marketing results, boosting both short-term conversions and long-term customer loyalty. But what’s “right” for your list? The answer, as always, hinges on sector, audience, and value delivered.

Patterns across retail, business services, non-profits, and publishers reveal vastly different expectations. Timing, segmentation, and email style matter too. Let’s dive into how professionals shape their approach, backed by the latest benchmarks and research on optimal email frequencies.

Industry Benchmarks: No Universal Rule

Looking across industries reveals one simple fact: email norms are highly context-dependent. E-commerce and news brands might communicate multiple times weekly, while non-profits or B2B services take a gentler approach. The logic is simple—audiences opt in with different goals and tolerances.

Here’s an at-a-glance summary of standard frequencies by sector:

Key points:

• E-commerce brands often ramp up frequency for seasonal offers, capitalising on periods when inboxes are more crowded, but buyers are more tuned in.
• B2B audiences expect relevant, business-focused updates in line with their work cycles—Monday through Thursday, generally, with fewer sends during holidays or industry lull periods.
• Non-profits see strong results with less frequent, more thoughtful communication. Over-mailing can erode donor goodwill.
• Publishers can often get away with daily issues, especially for opt-in newsletters, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Surveys echo this segmentation: while 54% of e-commerce marketers say 2–4 emails per month is “just right,” only about 10% of non-profits touch base weekly. One thing nearly all sectors agree on is that “at least once a month” is a practical minimum—going quiet for longer risks subscriber forgetfulness.

Segmentation: The Secret Lever

Raw volume isn’t the full story. Your audience is not a monolith, and what works for one segment may alienate another.

New and engaged subscribers are more receptive to frequent communications, especially when nurtured with welcome sequences or post-signup onboarding. These flows usually see sky-high open rates (91% for welcome emails is not uncommon).

On the flip side, dormant or lapsed subscribers are quick to disengage if bombarded. Here, category-specific “re-engagement” campaigns can gently invite action—or signal it’s time to prune the list.

Segmentation strategies might include:

• Grouping subscribers as “active,” “semi-engaged,” and “inactive” based on last open or click
• Setting differential send frequencies: e.g., weekly promos to recent buyers, monthly digests for lapsed users
• Using special “reactivation” flows for dormant segments rather than routine campaigns

Marketers who dynamically adjust cadence by engagement see substantial lifts in open and conversion rates, along with lower unsubscribe rates.

Content Matters: Promotions, Newsletters, and Transactions

The style and value of each email dramatically shapes how often your audience wants to hear from you.

• Promotional emails (sales, discounts) can tolerate higher frequencies, provided they consistently offer tangible value—shoppers expect regular deals, particularly in e-commerce.
• Transactional emails (order confirmations, shipping notices, password resets) form a separate stream. These are functionally necessary, prompted by user action, and do not generally cause fatigue.
• Newsletters and editorial content have the broadest range, from daily bulletins (in news media) to monthly roundups in other sectors.
• Informational or company news is the riskiest to over-send, as these messages are usually the first to be ignored or unsubscribed when frequency is too high.

A balanced approach might see frequent promos during a sale, weekly or biweekly value-driven content, and variable sends for purely informational updates.

Watch the Warning Signs

Engagement metrics provide almost instant feedback when you go too far—or not far enough—with your sending schedule.

Take note of these thresholds:

• Unsubscribe rates above 0.5% are a clear indicator of fatigue or annoyance
• If more than 10–20% of previously active subscribers stop opening, re-evaluate both frequency and content
• Expect spam complaints or unsub rates to spike quickly when frequency ramps up sharply

Listener feedback also speaks volumes: up to 73% of subscribers who opt out cite “too many emails” as a key driver. Yet, cutting back to less than monthly risks losing mindshare and diminishing your returns from the channel.

You’ll achieve best results by vigilantly monitoring three key numbers:

• Open rate (relative and absolute)
• Unsubscribe/spam complaints
• Click-throughs and conversions per email

When these shift, test and refine—because what worked last year may not fly this year.

Open Rates, Click-Throughs, and Subscriber Behaviour

There’s a delicate balance. Increasing frequency sometimes boosts overall clicks or revenue (simply by putting more in front of subscribers), but per-email open and click-through rates commonly dip as message volume rises.

The trick lies in understanding these trade-offs:

• Short term: sudden hikes in cadence often cause open rates to drop and unsubscribes to spike. Some disengaged recipients drop off straight away.
• Long term: after the first burst, engagement stabilises around a new baseline—core fans stick, lighter users fall away.
• Context matters: Well-timed increases (say, in the lead-up to a big sale or holiday) often result in spikes in conversion without lasting damage to your database, provided there’s a clear end date for the heightened cadence.

Demographics come into play too. Older subscribers are generally less tolerant of frequent emails; Millennials and Gen Z show more flexibility—especially if the content or offer appeals. Tailoring messaging rhythms to your key age groups can substantially boost list health.

Here’s how seasonal and demographic shifts might affect performance:

Techniques for Finding the Right Frequency

While benchmarks provide a useful guide, nothing replaces direct experimentation and adaptation to your own list. Forward-thinking teams borrow several tried-and-tested tactics:

• A/B split testing: Randomly segment your list. Try weekly sends for one group, biweekly for another, and monitor engagement and unsub rates. Allow a few cycles for trends to stabilise before deciding.
• Predictive analytics: Implement tools or custom logic that adjust frequency based on a recipient’s historic engagement. Some platforms automate “frequency capping,” sending less to unsub-prone addresses and cranking up for active fans.
• Preference centres: Let people choose their pace. Many ESPs offer this as a signup or account management feature. When you empower subscribers to select topics and intervals, complaints and unsubscribes tend to fall.
• Ongoing monitoring: There’s no “set and forget” in this domain. Your ideal frequency last year may not hold today, especially as seasons (and market conditions) change.
• Holistic channel strategy: Keep an eye on your brand’s presence across all platforms. If you’re running a high-volume email campaign, it may be smart to pull back on SMS or social touches to the same segment for the same period.

Here’s a sample workflow for refining cadence:

1. Start with industry norms (e.g., 2–4 per month for e-commerce)
2. Segment by proven engagement (recency of open/clicks, purchases)
3. Test both more- and less-frequent sends against a control group
4. Survey subscribers and adjust via preference centre options
5. Monitor metrics and course-correct as needed

Field Examples: Learning by Doing

One retailer found that moving from once to twice-weekly campaigns slightly raised total sales, but unsubscribes nearly doubled. They opted for a compromise: one value-focused email per week, supplemented by a biweekly sale alert only for the top spending tier.

A non-profit tightened its cadence from scattered bursts to a steady monthly send, layered with quarterly appeals to high-engagement segments. Open rates rose, and donor fatigue fell.

A news publisher, meanwhile, empowered readers to select “daily,” “digest” (twice weekly), or “just headlines” (weekly). Complaints plummeted with the implementation of this self-service approach.

In each case, regular review and willingness to adjust drove ongoing improvements.

Practical Takeaways

If there’s a single golden rule, it’s this: let audience data—backed by regular testing and sensible feedback loops—dictate your rhythm. Respect user autonomy by offering clear value, transparent opt-ins, and customisable preferences. Monitor performance at both the aggregate and segment level, adjusting in real time.

The art of frequency is less about a magic number than about curiosity, agility, and respect for your relationship with your subscribers. Your optimal cadence is not just what the benchmarks suggest, but what your audience tells you—through their behaviour, responses, and continued engagement.