How many emails one person should receive per week for B2B?

[Diana_Jakubaity]

Hi everyone,

Can someone please advise best practices on how many emails one person should receive per week/month, etc for B2B?

We currently send no more than one email a day and two per week per person. Also, we are considering to set up a cap and stop the communication that week if person receives more than two emails.

Any advise on the best practices?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Diana,

Just in case, and sorry if you already know this, setting the cap in Marketo can be done in the admin -> communication limits in Marketo.

I consider that 1/day, 2/week is a good limitation.

Looking forward hearing other experiences

-Greg

[Diana_Jakubaity]

Hi Greg,

Thank you so much for your reply! This is exactly what we are considering to do.

Was there any best practices you were looking into, any industry reports before you started sending 2 emails/week? Or was that purely based on your audience testing?

Currently I am doing a research and looking for reports and best practices before proposing this to my team.

Many Thanks,

Diana

[Grace_Brebner3]

Ooh this is such a tricky one, because it's so dependent on your database.

In my experience, the send frequency tolerance is directly correlated with engagement with the organisation - sometimes to surprising levels. You'll be able to judge better than any of us what's right for your brand! But as a few points of consideration, from my experience:

• customers tend to have a higher threshold for frequency than prospects.
• depending on the product, you often see a rising tolerance the closer you get to a sale, and then tolerance drops quickly after that (some more quickly, some less).
• customers with subscription type services tend to have a higher tolerance than one off purchases (e.g. I have a higher tolerance for Marketo emails than ones from a hotel I went to 2 christmas's ago). Marketo is constantly relevant to me. That hotel? Less so.

How that translates to numbers for you is something you can only really learn from a feel for industry standards and testing. Getting a feel for how frequently/deeply your prospects & customers are engaging throughout their lifecycle is often a good place to start. I've worked in instances where 5x a week works really well, and others where any more than 2 a month and you start having issues.

Hope that's helpful

[Kevin_McMahon1]

We have our communication limits set at 1/day and 3/week, but usually keep it to 1 or 2 per week. Through our experiences we have found 3 a week to be a bit overkill for some of our audience, so restrict hitting that cap as much as possible.

[Chris_Johnston]

That's a very dangerous question to ask. A better question is, how much engaging content do I have that people can't stay away from? I think that Grace Brebner​ hit it on the head that it really depends on the situation, but I'd look at my open rates, my conversion rates, and then test what threshold people are willing to go (ie. with little change to open/conversion rates) and what content you have to support higher sends.

[Diana_Jakubaity]

We found our solution - the preference center where we will give power to people to choose their own cadences and express interest in particular products. By default, we have setup not more than two emails per week and one email a day.