How many B2B marketing emails should I send?

With worldwide daily email users expected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025 and 86% of professionals describing email as their favourite communication channel, email marketing in B2B is as important now as ever.

But how many emails should a B2B marketer send?

Research has found that 35% of marketers choose to send between 3 and 5 emails per week to their customers.

And although this works as a general guideline, at Blend, we believe you should only send an email when you’ve got something to say. The question to ask is not ‘how many emails should I send?’, but ‘does this email say something truly valuable?’

Think about your buyer persona

Consider your ideal customer or persona when developing your email marketing strategy.

How is your persona likely to feel about email marketing? Do they have access to their inbox throughout the day, or do they work in a lab, for example? Are they able to make purchasing decisions, or will they need to forward your email to someone?

There’s no one right way to do email marketing, so consider what’s best for your business and your target persona. That should help give a good idea of what will work for you.

Types of B2B marketing emails

There are lots of different types of marketing emails at your disposal. Considering each can help you determine their frequency.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are an automated response to a lead or customer taking a specific action such as downloading content or requesting a demo. Only send these emails when the lead or customer takes the specified action.

They can be broken into three types:

• Confirmation. For example, to confirm a purchase or to acknowledge a lead’s request for more information.
• Thank you. Use these when someone completes a form on your website e.g. when they download your content. Include a link to what they downloaded to provide additional value. 
• Welcome. These emails welcome new subscribers. They are a perfect opportunity to provide more information to leads who have signed up for your newsletter or product trial.
  
  

Lead nurturing emails

Lead nurturing emails are a series of connected emails. They aim to qualify leads before they are passed to your sales team.

You can nurture leads through automated workflows, sending them content that is relevant to previous actions they have taken on your website, or information they have provided.

But, in our experience, lead nurturing doesn’t turn leads into customers at a huge rate in B2B. However, if you design them to be truly valuable to the recipients, your engagement rate is likely to increase.

Blog digests and newsletters

Blog digests and newsletters are two ways to showcase your blog content directly into your subscriber’s inbox.

We'd recommend only including one blog post per digest. This achieves the greatest level of engagement and ROI. When blog digests contain multiple posts, the engagement rate drops after the first post, meaning articles in positions two and three don’t get the same visibility.

Newsletters are another option. However, if you have an active blog, we’d advise against setting up a newsletter email campaign. We find it’s a better use of time to create content for your website, especially with the added SEO benefits. However, if you see results from your newsletter, then do continue. 

Informational emails

Informational emails keep your audience up-to-date with your business. They can include:

• Product updates. Let your subscribers know about product updates. But use these emails sparingly - they’re generally not the type of email people want to receive regularly. Consider sending a periodic round up of updates so you don’t bombard your subscribers.
• Event invites. Emails about your involvement in a live event or webinar are a great tool to increase attendees and showcase your expertise on the topic. Only email about these when they're relevant. As they are time-sensitive, you can email about them more frequently e.g. sending 'reminder to register' emails. 
• New content. Let your subscribers know when you create new high-value content like case studies and whitepapers. As you design your content to be useful for your subscribers, they’ll want to receive it.
  
  

5 other factors that affect email success 

The type of marketing emails you send is just one factor. There are other considerations that will affect the frequency of your marketing emails.

1. Trust. Building trust with your leads is imperative to the growth of your business. Overusing email could negatively impact that, so keep an eye on your email metrics and scale back if numbers are starting to decrease.
2. Relevance. The more relevant your emails are to your recipient's current interests or needs, the better (and the more they’ll trust you). If you don’t have anything relevant to email your subscriber about, don’t send it.
3. Timeliness. Sending emails relative to related events and actions is vital. There’s no point sending a thank you email a week after someone subscribes - the moment will certainly have passed.
4. Personalisation. Personalised emails have 26% higher open rates, and an improved click-through rate of 14% when compared to others. Make your emails as human and personal as possible.
5. Value. We can’t say it enough – only send an email that is truly valuable to the recipient.

Remember 

Email marketing isn’t about you or your company, it’s about providing value to your subscribers and customers. And it’s just one tactic in a wider inbound marketing strategy. By aligning the frequency of your emails to what is truly valuable for the recipients, you’ll achieve your marketing goals quicker.