Mastering Email Cadence: How to Send Emails at the Right Time
Initially, you decide to send email marketing newsletters every Thursday. After research, you want to switch strategies and send emails every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Now, will your subscribers be more happy or feel overwhelmed?
Naturally, the sudden increase in email-sending frequency can pressure subscribers to read emails and increase email unsubscribe rates.
However, with a proper email cadence, you can keep subscribers satisfied with your email content.
This guide will explore the strategies for finding the optimal timing and frequency to send emails and increase subscriber engagement.
Email Cadence Meaning
Email cadence refers to the frequency and timing of sending emails to subscribers. It’s a strategic plan to determine how often you’ll communicate with your marketing leads or subscribers.
Finding the best time to send emails increases overall engagement and email marketing conversions. However, this does not mean you must follow a strict process when sending emails.
Your subscribers might have varied interests and preferences, and timing emails accordingly is mandatory for improving engagement.
Most importantly, you must understand the key factors determining your email cadence.
Key Factors When Considering Email Cadence
Set down these key points when determining sending frequency:
- Audience preferences: The frequency of emails should align with your audience’s preferences and expectations.
- Your marketing goals: Understand why you’re sending the emails — do you want to nurture leads, build rapport, or promote products? Defining a goal will help you craft a proper email cadence.
- The type of content: Marketing newsletters and time-sensitive offers will require more frequent emails than promotional or educational messages.
- Level of audience engagement: Monitor critical email campaign metrics to know your audience’s preferences and adjust your email cadence accordingly.
A tested way to reduce unsubscribe rates is to study your audience’s behavior and preferences. For example, when you use psychographic segmentation and geographic segmentation, some subscribers might prefer long-form content once a week, depending on their lifestyle and time management.
Whereas a few others might occasionally require local promotions and event invitation emails. Knowing these distinct differences can help you craft engaging emails and retain customers.
How to Know Your Audience’s Preferences
Effective email marketing is directly linked with grasping your customers’ email choices.
Use these strategies to uncover their preferences:
- Directly ask your audience: You can include email frequency in the sign-up forms or create email surveys to let customers highlight their frequency preferences.
- Analyze email engagement metrics: Go through your email open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to know which times of the week have higher email engagement. If your unsubscribe rates are too high, it can indicate you’re sending too many emails.
- Leverage segmentation: Use a proper email segmentation strategy to divide your audience into segments based on interests and behavior. Tailor different email cadences to various segments to see what works best.
- Consider industry standards: Research industry benchmarks to know the general email cadence, but stick to your audience’s preferences.
- Experiment and iterate: A/B test different frequencies to see which one performs better.
Analyzing email analytics is a great way to seclude customers based on their profiles and behavior. Especially if it’s a sales strategy, your focus must be on getting the messages across in a short and simple form.
Sales Email Cadence Example
A typical sales email cadence follows the steps below:
- Day 1: Send an introductory email or connect on Linkedin.
- Day 3: Send a promotional email in the morning and call in the afternoon.
- Day 5: Call in the morning and leave a voicemail in the afternoon.
- Day 7: Send product videos/demos in the morning and call in the afternoon.
- Day 9: Send a final email offering a discount or coupon.
You don’t have to go through all of these steps. When a sale happens, you’ll typically target consumers with different types of emails such as post-purchase and promotional messages.
You can also mix communication channels to reach customers and potential clients. Either way, it’s best to learn how to use analytics and customer data to segment your audience effectively.
Using Analytics and Customer Data to Segment the Audience
By dividing your subscribers into smaller, more targeted groups, you can send more relevant and personalized messages. Behavioral segmentation helps you comprehend customer likes and dislikes throughout their email marketing customer journey.
The table below highlights how to use email metrics to segment your audience efficiently.
Email Cadence Tips | How to implement them |
---|---|
Use demographic segmentation | ‣ Divide your audience into different age groups to send relevant emails ‣ Create segments based on gender to address specific needs ‣ Segment customers by their geographic location to send them local information and marketing materials ‣ Target different professions with varied content and offers |
Analyze purchase behavior | ‣ Segment based on past purchases to send complementary products ‣ Group customers by how often they purchase to tailor your email cadence accordingly ‣ Target customers who have abandoned their carts with special discounts and offers |
Inspect customer psychology | ‣ Identify how much time each consumer spends on your website pages ‣ Determine what pages customers like to send content related to those pages ‣ Analyze which links and call-to-actions are the most popular to mirror those in your emails |
Use email engagement metrics | ‣ Segment users based on open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes to improve your email marketing strategy |
Successfully segmenting subscribers will allow you to find the optimal send times for different email sequences.
While email sequences and sales email cadence refer to sending emails at intervals, they perform different duties. A sales email cadence acts as a framework, whereas an email sequence defines the timing and content within that framework.
In addition, factors such as audience lifecycle stage and your industry niche can also influence the email cadence.
In the next section, we’ll delve into the factors that can stand between your email frequency and subscriber activity.
Factors Influencing Email Cadence
Determining email cadence requires a thorough understanding of your industry, campaign goals, and audience preferences.
And that starts with analyzing the factors affecting your email frequency and overall marketing strategies.
Let’s review them in the table below.
Factors Influencing Email Cadence | Details to Focus on |
---|---|
Audience characteristics | ‣ How often do your subscribers open emails and click on links within them? ‣ What are their preferred communication channels? ‣ Are they new leads, existing customers, or inactive subscribers? |
Your industry and niche | ‣ How often do your competitors send emails to their subscribers? ‣ What’s the standard email frequency in your industry? ‣ Does your offers require frequent updates or reminders? |
Your campaign goals | ‣ How often do you need to nurture leads? ‣ How frequently should you engage existing customers? ‣ What’s the optimal email cadence for promoting your services or products? |
Email content | ‣ Does your email content provide value to subscribers? ‣ Is the content timely and relevant to their interests? ‣ Are you asking them to take a specific action? |
Technical factors | ‣ Are emails reaching your recipients? ‣ What email marketing platform do you use? |
Legal considerations | ‣ Are you complying with relevant email marketing laws and regulations? ‣ Do you provide clear unsubscribe options? |
How Not to Let These Factors Affect Your Sales Email Cadence
These factors can further vary with email cadence. For example, you can alter your email timing to increase engagement in a particular customer segment or curate the email sending frequency to appeal to a certain demographic segment.
Let’s assume you’re trying to attract young professionals in regional areas to your products or services. You’ll typically send them promotional or announcement emails during their most active hours (10 am—3 pm).
if your customer research also shows that a particular demographic segment wishes to receive emails twice a week, you’ll modify your email sending frequency accordingly.
To help you refine this process, we’ll review the steps in determining a proper sending frequency for various types of emails.
Determining the Optimal Frequency for Different Emails
The consistency and timing of each email type generally vary. For example, a promotional email sent less frequently is more effective, whereas a newsletter sent randomly can have declining engagement.
Remember, automated email campaigns are not under your control. They are triggered by a user action such as signing up for your email newsletter or purchasing a product.
Your ESP then automatically sends an email based on the customer’s action. Transactional emails are another type of triggered email that must be timely to maintain customer trust and brand credibility.
We’ll review the best times to send standalone emails and messages that are part of a campaign.
Type of Email/Email campaign | Frequency |
---|---|
Promotional emails | Send infrequent promotional emails to maintain subscriber interest |
Sales emails | Get in touch often, but avoid bombarding customers with unwanted information and offers |
Email newsletters | It depends on the content and your audience’s preferences |
Transactional emails | They must be sent immediately after a user action |
Welcome email | It must be sent as soon as a user signs up for your email list |
Abandoned cart emails | They are best sent within a few hours of shopping cart abandonment |
Survey emails | They are sent periodically to gather customer feedback and improve products and services |
Analyzing Email Performance to Identify Areas for Improvement
While gathering customer feedback is a fine way to perceive your email’s value, it’s not until you track the email performance to get the full picture.
Here’s how you can systematically evaluate and enhance your email marketing campaigns.
1. Set Clear Goals and KPIs
Define the objectives for sending email campaigns. Is it to boost engagement, improve customer relationships, or increase brand awareness?
Common key performance indicators (KPIs) to track are:
Setting KPIs and maintaining an email campaign report will give you a clearer view of email cadence. You can then drive the desired action according to the audience behavior.
2. Email Elements to Focus for Improvement
Alongside email cadence, your email subject lines and content can impact overall user engagement. In fact, the subject lines are the first elements people notice and decide if they’ll open your emails.
Pay attention to these other critical factors to improve your email marketing strategy:
- Improve the subject line: Introduce funny email subject lines, last chance subject lines, etc, to see what works best for your audience.
- Enhance email content: Ensure your email copy provides value to subscribers instead of merely talking about your brand. In addition, use compelling email sign-offs to increase email responses. You can also encourage replies by dropping a question at the end of your emails.
- Consider the timing: Test different send times to optimize your email marketing.
- Focus on email design: Follow email design best practices and use a visually appealing email campaign template. Cluttered emails can make it uneasy to read, increasing unsubscribes. Often, this leads to a drop in email sender reputation and, eventually, email deliverability. That’s when most emails stay in the outbox without reaching subscribers’ inboxes.
- Enhance call-to-action buttons: Use clear and compelling CTAs to improve user satisfaction and conversions. When consumers don’t know where to go next, you might lose a huge part of the sales.
- Monitor email deliverability: The ability for your emails to reach customers’ inboxes is crucial in deciphering the success rate of your campaigns. Regularly test deliverability to fix issues leading to spam traps and avoid becoming a spam email sender.
While your subscribers are in control of some emails, you will be deciding the email cadence for the majority of emails you send.
If you haven’t run email marketing campaigns before, it could be difficult to determine email cadence without customer data. In this case, you can gain insights from your audience’s behavioral cues.
The next portion will cover tips and tricks to read the audience’s behavior and establish email cadence.
How to Use Behavioral Triggers to Understand Sending Time
Your email list can contain many audience segments divided geographically and behavior wise, and each could have customers with varied interests and choices.
It’s critical to read their behavior to understand each customer in-depth. For instance, you can group holiday shoppers to send relevant email coupons and offers during seasonal events.
You can use the table below to identify behavioral cues and adapt your email cadence.
Behavioral Triggers | Factors to Analyze |
---|---|
Track subscriber behavior | ‣ Email open rates ‣ Click-through rates ‣ Time spent on emails ‣ Email conversions |
Identify patterns | ‣ Do subscribers engage more on specific days? ‣ Is there a particular time they are more open to receiving emails? ‣ Are email engagement patterns consistent throughout the year? |
Understand customer interactions | ‣ Read customers’ website and email interactions ‣ Understand their past purchase behavior |
Use predictive analytics tools | ‣ Use tools that can predict the best sending times to determine email cadence |
Once you know when your customers are the most active, you can automate emails to suit that timing. For example, if you find that users engage the most at 11 am on Tuesdays, you can schedule emails to fit that time.
Your customers’ mindsets can shift based on their interactions with various online services and brands. Monitor their behavior and engagement to stay on top of email marketing trends.
The best practices below will help you meet users’ needs and preferences.
Email Cadence Best Practices
Before committing to a schedule and timing your emails, learn email cadence best practices to stay on track.
1. Start Slow and Gradually Increase
Regardless of the type of email you want to send, start by using a conservative strategy. Send emails once a week to monitor customer engagement and reactions. If they are positive, you can slowly increase the frequency of email sending based on their activities.
2. Stay Consistent
When users sign up for your email list, set expectations early by letting them know how often they’ll receive your emails.
For example, if your sign-up form or welcome email suggests users will receive emails every Tuesday at 11 am, stick to this schedule consistently. This will avoid confusing them and save your IP reputation.
3. Personalize Cadence When Possible
Use email surveys to understand what type of content and timing your audience most likely prefer. You can then tailor your emails to suit the data.
That data can also help you highlight the value proposition according to each user’s requirements. For instance, if a consumer looks for summer outfits, you can curate best sellers and provide additional discounts for this target demographic.
4. Avoid Over-Sending Emails
It’s natural to feel excited in the initial stages of email marketing. You want to build a solid rapport with subscribers, and emails are the only way to do that. However, be mindful of your email frequency. Sending too many emails can overwhelm users and cause them to lose interest in your business.
You want to monitor unsubscribe rates and engagement metrics to see where and why users keep dropping off. If you have a global audience, consider each audience segment’s timezones to decrease the likelihood of unopened emails.
5. Use Email Drip Campaigns
If you’re unsure of setting the email cadence, send email drip campaign to gradually introduce your subscribers to your brand without swamping their inboxes.
These drip campaigns can be:
6. Give Subscribers Control
Allow subscribers to choose how often they want to receive your emails. This helps cater to individual preferences. You can also provide easy opt-down options to help subscribers reduce the email frequency instead of completely opting out of emails.
7. Adjust Email Cadence for Seasonality
Increase email sending frequency during holiday or seasonal events. These are times when your competitors are eyeing the same people to increase their sales.
Watch out for special occasions to send reminders or follow-up emails to get the customer to take action.
8. Focus on Email Deliverability
Even when you get everything right, your subscribers might not take action because your emails never reach them. Your email deliverability rate shows if you follow email marketing regulations, clean email lists, and, most importantly, value customer preferences.
Using a reliable email marketing platform like Campaign Refinery removes the burden of maintaining consistent deliverability rates.
Use Campaign Refinery for Worry-free Email Marketing
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