Newsletters are fast taking over the email scene, and are becoming one of the most popular types of content on the entire internet.
Let’s assume that you’ve picked a niche, ideally something that you enjoy and can write about with some level of expertise. You believe there’s a substantial enough audience that you can generate a significant subscribe base.
Now you’re trying to figure out how often to send your newsletter. Let’s go.
What Factors into Newsletter Frequency?
There are a number of factors to account for when deciding how often to build and send your email.
Your Capacity & Resources
Let’s start with this one, as it’s probably the most important. No matter what you think your frequency should be, consider your available time.
If you have five kids and a full-time job, putting in a few extra hours every day might be a non-starter. Burning yourself out after a few weeks obviously won’t lead to the incredible long-term income you could make from a successful newsletter.
For now, maybe you could start by put a newsletter together every Saturday morning and send it out, regardless of optimums end times.
Time Required to Put Together Each Newsletter
Similarly, how long it takes you to put together a newsletter varies tremendously. If you want to send out solely aggregated content and you’re plugged into the niche, you might be able to put it together in an hour or less.
Take Today in Design. Owner Cole Derochie says that he puts together his daily newsletter in under an hour.
However, if you want to have custom design elements and longer-form content, it could take a single person days to put together a great newsletter.
Of course, there are the big, corporate newsletters that have entire teams working on each issue. That’s how The Hustle can put out daily issues with over 1,500 words.
It’s up to you to figure out how complicated you want to make each issue. However, take into account that you’ll get faster; Cole used to stay up until 2 AM every day working on each issue of Today in Design.
Your Niche
You should also consider how much newsletter content your niche can handle. News aggregators like NextDraft (run by just one person) and The Skimm can easily support daily sends. People want to know the daily stories and many already consume TV news programs every day.
However, you may be in a niche where you won’t miss much if you send out once or twice a week. Perhaps there literally isn’t enough content to send something every day.
Another thing to consider is changing your frequency throughout the year. You might have a newsletter that’s more seasonal, such as skiing or following a sports league.
Perhaps during the summer, your NBA newsletter could be once or twice a week. During the season, you could easily send out every day.
The Case for Increasing Your Newsletter Frequency
Here are the best reasons to send our your newsletter more often than you think.
1. Your Subscribers Want More
You might be considering your own email-checking habits, and how you get annoyed with certain brands that email too often. You’re likely being overly cautious with your own sending habits, worried that you’ll annoy people—which means unsubscribes and spam complaints.
However, those are likely pushy, salesy, and self-serving corporate emails—in other words, they’re not trying to provide you a benefit.
However, a value-driven, content-first newsletter is something that your readers genuinely look forward to reading. Your newsletter’s niche is something that your subscribers love reading about. If your newsletter entertains and informs them about that niche, they’ll be all-in.
When it comes to great content, people generally want more. Give us longer movies, books, and podcasts, as we discussed in another article about newsletter length.
2. Build a Memorable Brand
The more you send, the more top-of-mind you are for your readers. If you send just once per week, it’s easy for people to forget you. A more frequent send gets your readers trained to look for you in their inbox.
Ben Settle, for example, is perhaps the world’s biggest proponent of the daily email send. He doesn’t even send a traditional newsletter—it’s more like a daily thought or lesson followed by a naked sales link.
However, he does seven figures each year as a one-man show, and attributes most of his success to daily sends. However, selling every day only works because he’s massively entertaining, has a truly defined brand that people identify with, and he still gives out tons of free nuggets.
Also, consider that some of the most popular newsletters in the world, with millions of subscribers, send daily—including:
- Newsette
- The Skimm
- The Hustle
- Forbes Daily
- TLDR
- New York Time’s The Morning (17+ million subscribers!)
3. Increase Revenue
It all comes down to math.
Advertisers pay for space in your newsletter in a few different ways:
- Per click
- Per open
- Per newsletter send
No matter which newsletter revenue model you choose, more volume = more revenue.
The Case for Sending Newsletters Less Often
The truth is, if you’re sending out a great newsletter to subscribers who love your niche, most arguments favor sending more.
However, it’s possible that you’re sending too much if any of the following are true:
- You produce a lower-quality newsletter because you don’t have the time to build something better.
- Your open rates have dropped to 35% or lower. Most newsletter audiences are highly engaged, resulting in 40%+ open rates. Your quality might be substandard, or perhaps there simply aren’t enough truly interesting topics in your niche to send as often as you are.
- Your opt-out or spam complaint rates have increased. Same as above—it’s a sign that people aren’t totally digging what you’re doing.
You’ll notice a running theme—it’s all about the quality of your content. If your niche can support a terrific newsletter sent daily, then there’s no reason (aside from your available time) to not do it.
Creating a Newsletter Subscribers Want to Read
On our list of the best newsletter ideas for ongoing content, the single best suggestion is to curate content. In fact, most popular newsletters are centered around the idea of finding the most interesting articles in their niche and delivering those in each issue. Then, you just give a summary of the article or your own opinion about it.
Letterhead can help you do this by providing content automations to help load your feed with relevant links in your niche. With tools like this, you can put together newsletters in much less time so you can send them out as frequently as makes sense.
Schedule a consultation today to talk about how we can help you start & grow a newsletter business today.
