Most creators and businesses don’t have a problem coming up with email content—they have a frequency problem.

And when it comes to frequency, you probably fall into one of these three groups of email senders.

The first group does the bare minimum. They send one email a week or one a month and rarely check their analytics to see if they could be getting better results.

The second group wants to send daily emails to boost engagement and return on investment (ROI), but they hold back because they’re afraid of annoying subscribers.

The third group is not sure where to start, because they have seen daily, weekly, and monthly sending work well for some brands and flop for others.

Well, the truth is, there’s no one-size-fits-all email marketing frequency. The good news is that you don’t have to guess.

There are proven best practices that help you find the best email frequency that maximizes your email engagement and ROI. 

This guide walks you through those steps and shows you how to use beehiiv to make the process simpler and faster.

Why Trust Me?

I’ve spent five years implementing and writing about email marketing to help creators and businesses grow, and I enjoy sharing these insights in plain, simple language.

Email marketing frequency is simply how often you send emails within a given time period. That could be the number of emails you send in a day, a week, or a month.

For a creator running a newsletter, this might be as simple as sending one newsletter each week. 

You’ll often hear email frequency used interchangeably with email cadence, but they’re not the same thing. Frequency focuses on volume. Cadence looks at the bigger picture, including timing, order, and spacing between emails.

Take a B2B SaaS brand like beehiiv. In a typical month, beehiiv sends one newsletter, one to four product or event updates, and one to three promotional emails. During BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) week, promotional emails ramp up to five to eight sends.

That monthly send rate is the email frequency. When you factor in the order in which those emails are sent and the specific days and times they go out, that’s email cadence.

Now, here’s the thing: When you send too few emails or send them sporadically, your audience may forget about you. As a result, it’s harder to rebuild trust and engagement, which translates to leaving money on the table.

On the other hand, when you send too many emails, subscribers feel overwhelmed and start tuning out. When that happens, open and click rates drop, unsubscribe rates increase, and your sender reputation takes a hit.

The goal of email marketing frequency is to find a balance—get the best results while minimizing any potential risks.

No one sends emails just for the sake of it. There’s always a goal behind it. That could be driving traffic to your website, building a community, or increasing product sales.

The first step is to be clear on what that goal is and what metrics you’ll use to measure success.

At the same time, your goal should not ignore your audience. You need them to reach that goal. That’s why you should give before you ask. 

When you understand your subscribers’ goals, desires, and challenges, you can send emails that help them make progress. Do that consistently, and asking them to take action later, like signing up for an event or making a purchase, feels easier for you and for them. 

There are a few simple ways to learn more about your subscribers.

One option is to create multiple lead magnets and promote across your website and socials. The lead magnet a subscriber downloads gives you insight into their interests and what they want to learn more about.

Another option is to ask a few questions during signup, through a short quiz, or in a survey included in your welcome email.

A good example is DRMTLGY, a skincare brand. 

On their homepage, they use a short, visual, multiple-choice quiz to learn more about potential subscribers. Some questions are broad, like asking about your age, gender, and the climate you live in. Others are more specific to skincare, such as your skin tone, skincare goal, and how many steps you want in your skincare routine.

At the end, you enter your email to get a personalized skincare routine delivered to your inbox. At the same time, DRMTLGY gains useful context to send more relevant emails later.

That said, you don’t always need this level of detail. If you’re a journalist, author, or creator, it’s enough to clearly explain what subscribers will get when they sign up, then deliver on that promise consistently while asking for feedback to improve over time.

After analyzing more than 15 billion emails sent on the beehiiv platform in 2024, we found that 15.82% of creators send daily newsletters, while 65.62% send emails weekly. That makes weekly sending the most common starting point.

So if you’re just getting started, sending one email per week is a safe place to begin

It also helps to think about your baseline in terms of your capacity. Ask yourself: “How many helpful and relevant emails can I realistically send without burning out?” 

Staying consistent is far better than starting with an intensity that lets you give up on email marketing too early and fail to get the results you’re looking for.

Another helpful reference point is tracking your competitors’ email frequency and using that as a guide for your emails.

beehiiv’s data shows that engagement is highest on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The strongest send times on those days are 8am, 10am, and 11am UTC.

Use these benchmarks as a starting point. From there, you can test, adjust, and build toward a frequency and cadence that works best for your audience and your goals.

Inboxes are more crowded than ever. 

In 2024 alone, 15.6 billion emails were sent on beehiiv. That’s enough to fill the world’s largest library 100 times, and that’s without counting other email platforms.

So how do you stand out in this ocean of emails and get subscribers to open and read your emails?

Your email content. 

GetApp’s 2024 Advertising Preferences Survey found that 50% of readers unsubscribe because they receive too many emails. At the same time, 41% of them leave because the content is irrelevant to them. 

This tells us something important: you can send emails more frequently if people find them useful.

When your emails consistently help readers, trust builds over time. And that trust makes sales easier later. In fact, 99% of consumers say non-promotional content helps with their shopping decisions.

Instead of relying only on direct promotions, mix in different content types, such as:

Besides varying your content, segmentation ensures your emails stay relevant. It’s why 90% of email marketers report better email performance from segmentation.

Segmentation starts with using the details you’ve already collected about your subscribers. You can group subscribers based on things like:

These segments are the foundation for sending emails that feel personalized to a subscriber.

For instance, instead of sending six emails a week to everyone, you could send four to highly engaged subscribers and two to those who are less active. This alone improves engagement without having to reduce your email frequency.

You can also use automation to trigger emails when subscribers take specific actions. According to Klaviyo’s 2025 Benchmark Report, these automated messages generate the highest revenue per recipient in e-commerce:

If you haven’t already, start by implementing some of these flows that apply to your business. 

It’s the perfect way to increase your email frequency without overwhelming your entire email list. Start simple, and over time, refine them based on performance and subscriber behavior.

It’s normal for brands to increase email frequency around key moments like:

Subscribers expect these emails and look forward to them. A typical example is BFCM week. 

According to Optimove’s 2025 Marketing Fatigue Report, 56% of consumers say BFCM campaigns increase their likelihood to purchase, as long as offers are personalized to their interests. 

In other words, sending more relevant emails during this period (with the help of segmentation) help you stay top of mind and drive more sales for your business.

Revisit your email marketing goals and decide how you’ll measure success.

For most creators, journalists, and authors, engagement metrics like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes, and spam complaints are usually enough to guide their email frequency decisions.

Meanwhile, if email is a direct revenue channel for your business, you should track additional metrics like placed order rates, revenue growth, revenue per subscriber, customer lifetime value, and ROI.

Keep an eye on how these metrics change over time, especially when you adjust your email frequency.

Some email platforms offer built-in A/B testing for send times. If yours doesn’t, you can follow this simple process to test your email marketing frequency.

Start with a baseline schedule, for example, one email per week. Stick with it for at least 30 to 90 days and track your results.

Then, increase your frequency to two emails per week for another 30 to 90 days. Again, document changes in engagement, revenue, and subscriber feedback.

Continue testing in small steps until you notice a significant drop in engagement, revenue, or a spike in unsubscribes or spam complaints. That’s a sign you’ve probably gone too far, so start reducing your send frequency gradually until performance stabilizes.

Note: It’s important to increase your email frequency gradually. Google warns that sudden jumps, such as moving from two emails a week to six, can trigger spam filters and harm your Gmail deliverability.

Increasing your email frequency with an unengaged list is like watering dead plants. More effort doesn’t equal more growth.

Inactive subscribers drag down engagement, lead to more unsubscribes and spam complaints, and damage your sender reputation and email deliverability. When deliverability takes a hit, your future emails underperform, even when the content is good.

That’s why basic list hygiene matters. Make it a regular habit to:

A smaller, engaged list will always outperform a larger, inactive one. And when your list is active and engaged, you have more room to increase your email frequency without hurting your deliverability.

Finding the right email frequency seems overwhelming at first, but an email platform like beehiiv has all the tools to make the process easier.

beehiiv’s visual and comprehensive analytics dashboard helps you understand how your emails are performing.

You can track key metrics like open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam reports to see which topics resonate, which subject lines perform best, and whether you’re sending too often or not enough (as you adjust your email frequency).

beehiiv’s click summaries let you go a step further by showing which links get the most clicks. This makes it easier to improve future CTAs and place them where readers are most likely to engage.

Analytics tell you what’s happening, but subscriber feedback explains why it’s happening.

Alongside beehiiv’s performance metrics, you can collect qualitative feedback through polls and surveys. This helps you understand whether your send frequency works for subscribers and how useful they find your emails.

You can run a short survey in beehiiv and ask questions like:

To get more responses, keep surveys short. Use multi-choice questions where possible, and make open-ended questions optional. It also helps to tell readers how long the survey will take, for example, “2 minutes.”

Instead of a survey, you can also add a quick poll at the end of your emails with questions like:

If you want to send targeted emails to different groups of subscribers, beehiiv’s segmentation tools make it easy.

You can create custom segments based on factors like a subscriber’s acquisition source, signup date, custom fields, tags, and subscription tier (that is, whether they’re a free or paid subscriber).

You can also segment subscribers based on their behavior, such as whether they opened or clicked a specific email, and use that activity to trigger automations.

This is especially helpful when you want to only follow up with people who have shown interest. For example, when promoting an event, you can ask interested subscribers to click a link for updates, then send follow-up emails only to those subscribers or add them to a flow to receive those updates automatically.

beehiiv also lets you track engagement for each segment. If a segment’s engagement level drops, it may be a sign to adjust your content, ask for feedback, or pause emails to that group.

The better question isn’t how many emails you should send. It’s how many helpful emails you can send consistently without feeling overwhelmed.

If you decide to send more often, do it in steps. Gradual changes protect your deliverability and lower the risk of being flagged as spam. Pair that with segmentation and automation so higher frequency stays relevant for your subscribers.

In the end, there’s no single “right” email frequency. Start with a baseline, test small changes, and pay attention to what improves engagement and revenue for your audience.

beehiiv makes this easier by bringing segmentation, automation, analytics, and A/B testing tools under one user-friendly platform. Sign up for beehiiv’s free trial to try out these features!

There’s no universal rule for email frequency, but many marketers and newsletter publishers start with one email per week. This gives you room to increase your frequency when you have something to promote. From there, ask your audience and test different frequencies to see what drives the most engagement and conversions.

Start small, such as one email per week, and stay consistent. Use segmentation to keep emails relevant, clean your list regularly, and monitor metrics and feedback to adjust frequency and email content over time.

Start with a baseline of one email per week and stick with it for 30 to 90 days. Track your metrics, increase frequency gradually, and use polls or surveys for feedback. If engagement drops or complaints rise, scale back until you find your sweet spot.

Start by looking at your internal capacity, competitor strategies, and industry benchmarks. Then, adjust your frequency based on audience preferences, engagement levels, subscriber behavior, and key events. As you do that, keep a close eye on your analytics and subscriber feedback to ensure your emails are driving engagement and not overwhelming your audience.