In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson discusses the importance of increasing email frequency for better marketing results. He challenges the common misconception that sending fewer emails leads to better performance and provides data-driven insights to support his argument.

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Best Moments:

(00:40) Introduction to the controversial topic of email frequency

(01:38) The concept of relevancy equals frequency in email marketing

(02:26) Statistics on email open rates and frequency

(03:16) The importance of engagement for inbox placement

(04:06) Data on average email sending frequency for businesses and consumers

(04:52) Examples of email frequency from various brands

(06:00) Why lower performance metrics often indicate irrelevant content, not over-sending

(06:39) The importance of segmentation and personalization in email marketing

(07:40) Promotion of Marigold's relationship marketing ranking report

(08:36) Personal anecdote about Halloween candy distribution

(11:56) Reminder to register for Guru Conference and leave a podcast review

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MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!

Marigold is a relationship marketing platform designed to help you acquire new customers and turn them into superfans with their best-in-class loyalty solutions. Don’t take my word for it though, American Airlines, Honeybaked Ham, Title Boxing, and Notre Dame University are also customers!

Regardless of your size, check out Marigold today to get the solution you need to grow your business!

Check out this free content from marigold that Jay has loved digesting, 5 Steps For Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform.

Foreign. Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this, not that, presented by Marigold. And today, we're talking about something that everybody's going to be super angry at me about, and that is.

Okay, you are not sending out enough email to your database. What? I know somewhere out there you're listening. Like, this dude's out of his mind. He has no idea how much I'm sending out.

And I'm telling you, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, you are not sending out enough email to your database. I'm going to explain to you exactly what I mean and the frequency and what other people are doing.

But before we get into all of that, obviously, you can't just send out garbage, okay? If you send out meaningless garbage, you know, book a meeting. Book a meeting, Book a meeting. Here's our big discount. Big discount, Big discount.

And that's all you're sending out. That's just wallpaper. That's garbage. And no, you can't send that out a billion times because that's useless.

But if you're sending out good stuff, you need to be sending out more. Here's the secret sauce about email marketing. Relevancy equals frequency.

The more relevant it is, that stuff that you're sending, the more often that you can send it, okay? I don't care if somebody sent me an email twice a day, every day. If the emails were good and relevant, I want more.

I hear this all the time, and this drives me crazy. People say our email marketing doesn't work because we're sending out too much. We're sending out too many emails. Wrong. That makes no sense.

You can't send out less email, okay? And get a lot more business. It just doesn't work that way. So here's a crazy stat that most marketers are going to be like, what? And why is that?

Matt, what are you saying? Okay, Email open rates, the percentage of people that open up your email. Okay, Email open rates rise.

They go up 17% for consumer marketers and 21% for business marketers when you send out at least five times per month. And this is a metric that has risen over the last 18 months that if you send out at least five emails per month, your email open, rates go up.

Why is this? Because now, deliverability, how you stay in somebody's inbox rather than the junk folder. Okay. Or the spam folder.

It's not about if you write the word free in your subject line or if you put a special character in in your body copy or in your subject line. That's not what's determining whether or not you're staying in that inbox.

What's determining whether or not you're staying in that inbox is engagement. How often are people opening and clicking and interacting with your emails?

That is what the receiving email infrastructures are looking for is this person who's receiving the email, are they engaging with this sender's emails? And if you don't send out enough emails, you're not going to generate enough engagement. And that is how you wind up going to the junk folder.

Infrequent sending hurts you dramatically. Okay, so that is a game changer in the last few years. Now, let's get into exactly how often people are sending.

So when you listen this episode and someone's like, we're sending too much.

I want you to forward it to them, it's like, well, this crazy guy Jay just shared all this stuff about why we need to be sending more, and this is it. Okay, here's the stuff.

All right, first off, from World Data Research, business marketers on average send at least four times for 81% of business marketers send at least four times a month. 81%. So almost everybody sending at least one time a week. On the consumer side, it's 89% are sending at least one time a week.

But over 50% of business and consumer marketers, all marketers over 50% are sending at least seven times per month. Okay. That's almost twice a week for every business and consumer marketer.

DataBox released that 13.3% of business and consumer marketers are sending emails daily. Wow. Okay, now let me give you some specifics on different brands from all over the map to give you an idea. And this is data from mailcharts.

How about the Content Marketing Institute? They literally are teaching us how to do content marketing. They send out, on average, nine emails per week. Per week. Okay, how about Warby Parker?

You know, they make all the glasses and stuff. They send out 5.58 emails per week. This isn't per month. This is per week. Oh, but I'm an association. I do this. I'm in this boring category. Whatever.

Okay, how about the Chronicle of Higher Education. They send out six times per week. No, but I'm in the SaaS space. I do B2B SaaS. Okay, how about Marketo?

Marketo, which is owned by Adobe, is one of the largest email sending platforms on earth, Considered like one of the best in class solutions. How often do they send out their promotional email? This is not transactional stuff.

This is promotional emails, like newsletters and offers and all that stuff. Marketo sends out 5.85 times per week. All right, so why am I trying to drive home this point?

Because, you know, we're heading into the busiest sending time of the year and marketers are like, oh, our performance is down, our open rates are down, our click throughs are down, we're sending out too much, we're annoying people. No, when those metrics are going down, it's because you're sending out irrelevant stuff. You're sending out really bad subject lines.

You're sending out stuff that is not something that's to the benefit of the recipient. It's the benefit of you, the sender. You can be sending out a lot more, and when you send out a lot more, you drive a lot more business.

Now, should you send every email to everybody in your database the exact same emails? Absolutely not. That's ridiculous. Okay? Segmentation, personalization. These are the ways that you can allow for greater frequency. Okay?

Some of your database probably wants an email from you every single day.

Some of your database maybe not as much, but overall, if you think that you're going to send less and generate more business, it's not going to happen. It's not that hard really to wind up sending this much. I mean, you send out a newsletter maybe once a week.

You have an offer email that you're going with at least once a week, right? You have maybe some other thought leadership content that you're sending out a week. Here's a recap of this week's stuff in the industry, right?

Or here's a new trend on the consumer side. All right, you need to come up with how to be relevant and how to be more frequent to stay top of mind to allow for greater deliverability. Okay?

People like interacting with brands ongoing. If you're an infrequent sender, you're going to lose. All right, before we get into.

Since you didn't ask, I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is my email sending platform. I talk about them all the time because they're awesome. I don't care if you're small, medium, or large.

If you're not happy with your email sending platform, I know this is the time of year everybody gets like, oh, I don't like it. You should go to meet marigold.com and check them out. Or you could DM me and I'll hook you up on LinkedIn.

But they have a new piece of content that you got to check out. They analyze 200 specific brands and how these brands are doing loyalty marketing or relationship marketing.

And they break down each brand like, what's McDonald's doing? What's chewy doing? I'm telling you. Want to check out this report? It is wild. It buckets all the stuff into different buckets.

You can go to jschwettleson.com marigold and you can download this relationship marketing ranking report. They surveyed 20,000 people on these 200 brands and you get the behind the scenes look. So check that out@jschweddelson.com Marigold it is free.

It is awesome. It is a great, great piece of content. All right, let's get into.

Since you didn't ask, you know, I was Halloween's coming up and I was thinking about Halloween candy. Now in my neighborhood, Halloween, like, people come by the house a lot.

I'm talking about, like hundreds of people will come by the house and get candy. It's a crazy neighborhood for all that type of stuff, which all sounds great and all.

And then my kids are a little bit older, not a little bit older, 17, 18, so they can care less. They're off at somebody else's house. I don't even know what they're doing. But, but we give out candy.

And I have lost my faith in, in, in humanity every time Halloween happens because I try to step it up and I buy awesome candy. Okay? So every year I'll buy Push Pops in different flavors, which are very popular. Okay. If you want to know, it's very popular. That.

And I buy Pixie sticks, the really long, not the little ones, the really long Pixie sticks. And I give those out in different flavors and some other really good stuff. And I would give out, like, I know the full candy sizes.

None of this, like, small stuff. And then what happens is. And the reason I've lost my faith in humanity is these kids come by. Okay. It's not like the little kid.

The little kids are cute. If you're like three or four, you're very cute. Whatever. It's more like the, I don't know, 11 to like 14 zone.

They'll come up and they'll dig through whatever I got to find the exact flavor that they want, which is very rude. Not just take one, whatever. Almost nobody gives me a thank you, which I can't stand. I'm not like, you know, hey, you better be nice to me. Whatever.

You drop me a thank you. What's the big deal? Okay?

And then what they do, these like 11 to 14 year olds, what they do is they'll go and they'll think I'm a moron, which I kind of am. And they'll come back in 10 minutes and pretend they never came to my house because they know I got the good candy, okay? And they'll try to get more.

And then I have to call them out and it's super awkward. Like I'm calling out a 12 year old. Like, what are we doing? I'm like, dude, you were just here. Come on, dude. I'm going to run out of candy.

That's not cool. And I try to be cool. I really do. And so that's it. This is my rant. I have changed my plan. Here's my new plan. Things need to change immediately.

I am no longer going to have variety at my house. I am no longer going to have eight different things that are in this big bucket. Because that is what's leading to the problem.

They're on this search, this treasure hunt for the best thing in this bucket that I got. I'm causing the problem. So I told my wife this year, new plan. I am buying one candy in one flavor and that's it.

So there's gonna be no digging that goes on. This is the idea that I have. This is the brilliant idea. What I'm not gonna do. No matter what, I'm not buying, like, the thing. Like.

Like some people give out Welch's. Welch's fruit snacks. Listen, a lot of people do that and it's like, almost healthy. Not exactly healthy. Whatever. Listen, this is Halloween, okay?

The kids want candy. Let's give them candy. Let's not mess around. We don't need to give them something mildly healthy.

I went to somebody's house and they were giving out fruit. What are you doing? Stop. This is Halloween. Enough. Okay? But you don't need to give out Welches. Whatever. Go. Go real.

Get some Snickers or get some Skittles. You know, Enough. All right? So I'm going one flavor. It's probably not going to be as good as in the years in the past.

I'm very sorry to everybody out there that comes to my house, but I can't take it. I just can't take the digging. I don't know what I'm talking. I never know what I'm talking about anyway. Please. This is the very last moment.

This is it. This is the moment you can register for guru conference. Gurucom.com please go into it. It's free virtual. Also, leave this thing a review.

Do me a solid. It helps the algorithm. It circulates it. It would be so awesome if you took 30 seconds left to review. You are awesome.

Give out good candy, but only one flavor and one kind. This is the words to live by later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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