The Goldilocks approach: how often to email your Shopify customers

One question that comes up when email marketing is how frequently should you be emailing your customers?

The quick answer is: more than you are.

The helpful answer is: as much as you can.

The best answer is: as often as it's profitable.

There's a wide range of sending frequencies you can use. I've seen a lot of stores start with monthly or weekly and then change after awhile. Either they get tired of it and never email or email once in a blue moon, or they go automation-crazy and schedule all the emails.

You want somewhere in the middle. Your Goldilocks zone.

Research, studies, and anecdotes show that more email up to around one email per day can work for ecommerce stores. Some might support more, some might support less. Aiming for one email per week up to one per day is probably a good target.

But the how often you email isn't the most important part. It's the quality of the email and how they drive profit.

Sending one high-quality email per quarter for a major launch is better than sending slap-dash emails every day.

Though if you can send one high-quality email in a quarter, surely you can send two. Or three. Or four.

Once you have your analytics figured out and you can track orders back to email, then you can really experiment with sending more emails. Keep track of your subscribers sentiment (e.g. unsubscribes, complaints) and balance them against the number of orders.

You'll likely wind up sending a bit more emails than you do now.

Eric Davis