Email marketing frequency: How often to send emails?

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Your email marketing frequency impacts campaign and automation performance beyond open and click rates. Finding the optimal frequency for your audience will help to drive conversions, revenue, and subscriber satisfaction, whereas too many or too few emails will lead to poorer results.

So, there’s a balance to strike in how often you send emails, but there isn’t a universal best practice, either. The best email cadence will be determined by the types of emails you send, who you send them to, and their engagement patterns.

Join us below to discover how often you should send email marketing and tips to optimize your strategy to achieve your goals.

What is email marketing frequency?

Email marketing frequency is how often you send messages to subscribers — in other words, your sending pattern. While frequency counts your emails per week or month, email cadence shapes the entire sending strategy, including timing, messaging variety, and campaign purpose.

Your sending schedule impacts open rates, clicks, and revenue directly. Send too often, and subscribers tune out or unsubscribe. Send too rarely, and they forget your brand exists. Landing between two to four monthly messages suits most ecommerce businesses.

Metric	Too many emails	Too few emails
Click rate	Falls as frequency increases	Remains higher but reaches fewer people
Open rate	Follows the same drop as click rates	Stays high, but total opens decrease
Conversion	Initial boost followed by a decline	Steady but with missed revenue opportunities
Unsubscribe rate	Increases with each additional nuisance email	Remains low, but engagement may wane

How often should you send marketing emails?

Most ecommerce businesses find that one to three weekly emails maintain optimal engagement without causing list burnout.

Finding your optimal frequency

That baseline changes when you segment your audience. Regular purchasers welcome more frequent updates about new products, while occasional browsers need less communication.

Of course, excessive emails rapidly degrade performance. Each additional weekly email can increase unsubscribe rates. Worse still, subscribers receiving too many messages might mark them as spam, damaging your sender reputation and future deliverability.

Timing matters as much as frequency

Frequency isn’t all that matters — it’s also crucial to send emails at optimal times. Tuesday emails generate the highest open rates at 11.36%, while Friday emails drive the most conversions.

For optimal monthly engagement, target the 10th and 24th for opens, the 2nd and 26th for clicks, and the 1st and 30th for conversions.

Sending too infrequently creates different problems. When you message subscribers only once a month month or less, your brand becomes forgettable and irrelevant. Sporadic sending also makes it harder to build momentum in your campaigns.

The power of segmentation

New subscribers might need more frequent touchpoints during their first month, while loyal customers may engage with a consistent weekly newsletter. Email segmentation groups your customers for that targeted messaging.

Create segments based on engagement levels, purchase history, and browsing behavior. Then, adjust your sending frequency for each group. That targeted approach significantly reduces unsubscribes while maximizing engagement where it matters most.

Impact on ROI

Email frequency directly impacts your return on investment. Sending too many emails increases your costs while potentially reducing engagement. Conversely, sending too few means missing revenue opportunities.

Seasonal factors also affect frequency-based ROI. During peak shopping events, subscribers typically tolerate and engage with more frequent messages. Scale back during slower periods to maintain list health and avoid fatigue.

Leveraging automation for perfect timing

How can you send emails at a frequency and time most convenient for your subscribers? Automation is the answer. Omnisend research shows that in 2024, automated emails drove 18% of orders while making up only 9% of sends.

Automation sequences alongside personalized messaging typically generate higher returns than campaigns and email blasts. Setting up an email drip campaign and transactional messages will cover your customer journey at optimal moments.

Monitor your key metrics when adjusting frequency and create separate sending calendars for different audience segments to maximize engagement and revenue.

How many marketing emails to send per week

Research shows that most companies send two to five emails weekly to engaged subscribers, but the optimal frequency depends on the audience’s unique preferences, behavior, and message types.

Here are some guidelines for different email types:

Promotional emails

• Limit promotional emails to once or twice weekly
• Pair time-sensitive offers with genuine value to boost engagement
• Consider combining promotional content with educational information
• Segment based on browsing behavior to increase relevance

Transactional emails

• Send these for all relevant purchases and order updates
• Consider combining order and payment messages into one email
• Use clean, minimal designs that highlight important information
• Pair email with transactional SMS to reduce email fatigue

Newsletters

• Commit to a regular pattern (weekly or bi-weekly)
• Build anticipation with consistently valuable content
• Use professional newsletter templates
• Test long-form versus short-form content with your audience

Re-engagement emails

• Send these three times over one month
• Use engaging subject lines that stand out from regular promotions
• Focus on what’s changed or improved since their last engagement
• Remove long-term unengaged recipients to maintain your list

Abandoned cart emails

• Send these whenever an abandoned cart is triggered
• Create a sequence with decreasing intervals
• Include product imagery and direct checkout links
• Address common objections that cause abandonment

A/B testing email frequency

How many marketing emails are too many? The best way to find out is through A/B testing. 

Create multiple test groups receiving different email frequencies over three to four weeks. Then compare open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and revenue between groups.

Monitor engagement metrics, sender reputation, and spam complaint rates to find the optimal cadence for your campaigns.

How to avoid email fatigue

One of the most crucial email marketing frequency best practices is to avoid fatigue: when subscribers are tired of seeing your emails with signs of low engagement.

Low engagement can eventually lead to unsubscribes, spam complaints, block lists, and an adverse effect on your sender’s reputation.

Here are some quick tips to avoid email fatigue:

• Set clear expectations during signup about email frequency
• Segment your audience and adjust frequency based on engagement levels
• Provide preference centers where subscribers can select their desired frequency
• Automate transactional messages and drip campaigns for optimal send times
• Monitor engagement metrics for signs of fatigue (declining open rates, increasing unsubscribes)
• If subscribers show signs of fatigue, take a break from your standard sending pattern and use re-engagement tactics after 30, 60, and 90 days
• Focus on quality over quantity — make every email count with irresistible offers and helpful content that improves their customer experience

Spotting email fatigue

Email fatigue shows up in declining engagement metrics long before subscribers hit the unsubscribe button. Watch for dropping open rates, especially from previously active subscribers. 

Click rates often fall faster than opens, indicating diminishing interest in your content. You might also notice increased spam complaints and a growing number of inactive subscribers who ignore your messages. 

The most telling sign is when seasonal promotions or sales that historically performed well begin underperforming compared to previous years.

Common causes of email fatigue

Sending too frequently is at the top of the list of fatigue triggers, but irrelevant content causes just as much damage. Emails that don’t match subscriber interests or purchase history feel like intrusions rather than valuable communications. 

Poor segmentation that treats all subscribers identically regardless of their behavior or preferences leads to disengagement. 

Inconsistent sending schedules can also cause fatigue as they commonly disrupt subscriber expectations. Finally, emails that lack a clear purpose or compelling offers give subscribers no reason to engage, creating a pattern of disinterest that’s difficult to reverse.

How to find the right email cadence

Follow these steps to find the optimal cadence for your email marketing strategy:

Let your subscribers choose

Allow subscribers to decide on email marketing frequency according to their preferences. You can do this as part of your opt-in form to segment your customers accordingly. You could also add a link to edit email preferences at the footer of every message.

Depending on the types of content you provide, you can ask them to choose between multiple times per week, once a week, bi-weekly, or monthly. 

Giving your customers more control over how they receive communications from you makes every email more welcome and, consequently, improves click-through rates. Additionally, it helps lower your unsubscribe rate, one of the many critical metrics that determine the success of your campaigns. 

Check out this great example from Garden Trends for a beautiful yet functional email footer:

Clicking on “Update preferences” takes you to a dedicated page where you can choose your preferred topics, as well as opt-in to receive SMS campaigns:

A step-by-step guide to A/B test email frequency

Omnisend’s email A/B testing features help you discover the perfect pattern of timing, content types, and frequency. Here’s an example of the email settings step in the A/B test workflow, showing two email versions with different subject lines, preheaders, and templates:

To create a campaign A/B test

• Navigate to Omnisend’s Campaigns tab and click New Campaign
• Select Email A/B test from the options:

• Configure your Email settings, including a subject line, preheader, sender name, and template
• Click Next Step
• Under the Who should we send to? page, select All subscribers, or Let me choose segments:

• Click Next step
• Configure your A/B settings, including how to determine the winning combination, such as Click rate after 24 hours:

• Click Next step
• The Review and confirm page will show you all settings with an option to Send now, Schedule for later, or Save & close

Omnisend lets you run A/B tests with as few as 10 subscribers, but we recommend segments with at least 2,000 subscribers for reliable results to inform your email cadence.

If you’re new to segmentation, behavioral segmentation is one of the most powerful tools for ecommerce, as it groups people by how they interact with your brand. Creating tests for these segments helps you collect data from engaged individuals.

Once your Email A/B test campaign runs, Omnisend collects data and feeds it to Reports > Campaigns. Look beyond open rates to click-through rates, conversion metrics, and revenue generated to find the best timing, frequency, and sequence.

To create an automation A/B test

You can also A/B test automated emails. Add an A/B test block anywhere in the automation workflow structure and edit the conditions it generates. To get started:

• Navigate to Omnisend’s Automation tab and select Create workflow
• Select a workflow, such as Welcome
• Modify your triggers and add an A/B testing flow action when ready:

There’s also a pre-built A/B test automation called Cross-Sell Delay A/B Test, found in the Automation tab, which you can use to test email marketing frequency for cross-selling:

That test splits participants 50/50, with one message triggered after three days and the other after seven days. The message content stays the same, so this A/B test aims to determine the best frequency for cross-sell emails.

Keeping your subscriber list clean

Clean email lists deliver higher engagement, better deliverability, and more accurate testing results. While you can clean your lists before adjusting frequency, the relationship works both ways — your engagement metrics also signal when it’s time for list maintenance.

Watch for these warning signs that your list needs cleaning:

• Open rates dropping below your average
• Click rates falling by more than 25% compared to your historical average
• Bounce rates exceeding 2% on regular campaigns
• Unsubscribe rates climbing above 0.5% per send
• Revenue per email slowing or declining despite consistent content quality

Omnisend’s List Cleaning tool identifies four problematic subscriber types: invalid addresses that bounce, spam traps used by ISPs to catch bad senders, typos in email addresses, and disposable emails that self-destruct after use.

You can clean your list in Reports > Deliverability. Scroll down to Email list hygiene and go to Email list cleaning to open your results page:

Use this three-part cleaning strategy as part of your regular email maintenance:

1. Run a re-engagement campaign targeting subscribers inactive for 90-120 days
2. Use Omnisend’s List Cleaning tool to identify and remove risky contacts
3. Segment your newly cleaned list based on engagement levels to test different sending frequencies

Remember that unsubscribes aren’t failures — they’re opportunities to focus your resources on people who want your content. A smaller, more responsive list generates higher ROI than a bloated one filled with disinterested contacts.

How often should you send marketing emails: Wrap up

Finding your perfect email frequency requires testing and refinement. Start with one to three weekly emails, then adjust based on your audience engagement patterns.

Monitor how segments respond differently to various sending schedules. Regular purchasers often welcome more frequent contact, while casual browsers need space between messages.

Declining open rates, rising unsubscribes, or increasing spam complaints signal you’re sending too often. Clean your subscriber list regularly to maintain accurate test results, as removing unengaged subscribers improves deliverability and the quality of your insights into what works.

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