How often should an ecommerce store send email?

The question of how often to send only makes sense once you split your programme in two, and most stores that feel they are sending too much are actually sending too many of one kind.

Flows fire on what a person did. A welcome sequence starts because someone signed up. An abandoned cart message goes out because a cart was left. A replenishment reminder arrives because a customer's product is running low. These are not part of your frequency budget in any meaningful way, because they are triggered by the recipient rather than by you, and they arrive at the moment they are relevant. A subscriber can receive several flow messages in a fortnight and find every one of them useful.

Campaigns fire on your calendar. A new product, a seasonal edit, a restock, a piece of content. These are the ones that create the feeling of too much email, because they arrive whether or not the recipient was thinking about you.

So build the flows first, without worrying about frequency, then set a campaign rhythm on top. Stores that do the reverse end up sending frequent, generic campaigns because their automated messages are not doing the work.

One to four campaigns a month suits most stores, and the right number in that range is whatever you can fill with something a customer would want.

Work it out from the calendar rather than from a rule. List what genuinely happens in your business over the next quarter: launches, restocks, seasonal changes, a price change worth explaining, a piece of advice your customers keep asking for. Count them. That is your campaign schedule. If the list is thin, sending weekly means padding, and padding is where discount-only emails come from.

The category matters here. A store selling a consumable that people reorder every few weeks has a natural reason to be in touch often. A store selling something bought once every few years does not, and pretending otherwise trains the list to ignore you.

The test we apply to any campaign is simple. If you would not send this to a customer you know personally, do not send it to twenty thousand people. That single filter cuts most of the sends that damage a list, and it usually raises revenue rather than lowering it, because the sends that remain get opened.

One frequency for the whole list is the actual mistake, more often than the number itself. Split the list by recent engagement and send different amounts to each group.

People who have opened or clicked recently can take your full schedule. They are interested and the messages are welcome. People who have not engaged for a few months should get much less, because continuing to mail them harms you twice: they will not buy, and inbox providers watch how recipients respond to decide where your mail lands. Every send to a group that ignores you makes the next send to everyone else more likely to miss the inbox.

So build a sunset process. After a period of no engagement, drop someone to a lower frequency, try one re-engagement message, and then suppress them if nothing changes. The list gets smaller and the revenue usually goes up.

At the other end, your repeat buyers can take more than you think, provided what they receive is different from what a first-time subscriber receives. Give them early access, restock notices and product advice rather than the same promotional email everyone gets.

Your own numbers will tell you whether the frequency is right, and four of them do most of the work.

Unsubscribe rate per send is the clearest. A rise that persists over several sends, rather than a spike on one, means people are getting more than they want. Spam complaints matter more than unsubscribes even though the numbers are tiny, because they carry the most weight with inbox providers.

Open and click rates falling while the list grows means new subscribers are joining and immediately disengaging, which usually points at the sign-up offer promising something different from what you send.

Revenue per send is the one to judge additions by. If you add a fourth monthly campaign and total revenue does not move, you have not added a send, you have split the same revenue across more emails and paid for it in list health.

And watch orders, not just email metrics. A store can raise clicks by sending more discount emails while total margin falls. The point of the programme is orders at a healthy margin, not activity in a reporting dashboard.

The right frequency in a peak season is higher than the rest of the year, and it should be planned rather than improvised.

During a peak, people expect commercial email and are actively shopping, so a store that normally sends twice a month can send weekly or more without the usual cost. What makes the difference is that each message has a distinct reason to exist: a deadline, a restock, a shipping cutoff, a specific edit. Sending the same offer five times with a different subject line is what damages a list, not the count.

Two practical points. Warn people in advance if you are going to increase frequency, and give them the option to receive fewer messages rather than none. A preference link in the run-up to a peak keeps subscribers who would otherwise unsubscribe in November and never come back.

Then return to the normal rhythm afterwards, and clean up. The peak brings in a lot of new subscribers who joined for a discount, and the weeks after are when you find out which of them are actually customers. Give that cohort a proper welcome sequence rather than dropping them straight into the general schedule.