How often should you email your email subscribers? Every month? Every week? Every day? Every hour? The traditional answer to this question is that you should define email frequency rules that your company strictly enforces.

There's lots of problems with this approach. From a pragmatic perspective it is really hard because you'll get desperate stakeholders begging you for an exception to get their huge product announcement out just hours after you deployed a routine weekly update. Turning down the requests on the grounds that you're just enforcing contact rules is likely to be career limiting. However before you get all comfortable that at least doing the right thing by your customers, research in this field has been pretty definitive that contact frequency rules are useless and if you have something relevant to say then you can email your customers every fifteen minutes.

Of course the operative rule in the previous paragraph is relevance. You live and breathe what your company offers, and the latest widget is pretty big news for you. Your customers have a more more balanced life and are unlikely to be as excited by the widget as you are. Contact rules came about as a way to prevent excited marketers from telling their subscribers about every little piece of news.

One of the emails I help with is for a sports team. Some of our fans want to hear everything that goes on while others only want to hear the biggest announcements of the season.

It's not just different levels of engagement. Some fans are interested in player profiles or match reports while others want discounted tickets and special deals.

Best practice is to not use frequency rules at all. Instead score how relevant this message is for each of your subscribers and only send it to those that pass the threshold.

This can't be achieved using campaign management software and is one of the major benefits provided by sophisticated marketing automation platforms.

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