How Frequent is Too Frequent?

The other day I was talking with a customer about her organization's email newsletter - a weekly email to its members - current news and events for the week. She expressed concern that some subscribers considered weekly emails to be too frequent and asked for advice.

Let them choose
Giving her subscribers the option to choose a weekly email or a monthly digest is a simple way to please more subscribers - they simply have to make the choice.

This question is part of a bigger idea I've discussed before which is:

Your subscribers just aren't that into you
Taking a line from the personal relationship field, but equally relevant. You want your subscribers to know everything about your organization - it's what you do.

Your subscribers, on the other hand, have lives outside of their interaction with your organization. It isn't the most important thing on their mind. Really, it isn't.

With this idea, it's usually best to start an email newsletter using a frequency of either quarterly or bi-monthly and then let your most ardent supporters/readers choose to receive it more frequently - if that is an option you want to provide.

It is much easier to let the interested subscribers choose a more frequent newsletter than it is for getting disinterested subscribers to choose a less frequent newsletter. Trust me. They're disinterested (too a degree) which means they probably won't go out of their way to edit their profile - they'll simply not read the emails (which hurts your brand by the way.)

Start with infrequent, work towards frequent
There are actually two reason to do this. The first I've already discussed - easier to move some subscribers to more frequent than it is to move them to less frequent emails.

The other reason to choose this approach is that sending newsletters or marketing emails takes effort. Yes, you can send with a simple click, but coming up with new content week after week (or month after month) is not an easy task. And if you simply rehash old content, your subscribers will see right through this.

So make things easier on yourself and your subscribers, start small (infrequent) move to big (frequent). And along the way, learn a whole lot more about your subscribers (what they want, who they are, etc) so the issue of frequency goes away completely due to the highly relevant nature of your emails.