Most ecommerce teams decide email frequency as part of the campaign calendar. Two campaigns this week, three next week, and a few more during the sale.
That makes planning easier, but it also assumes the number should be decided before you know what customers are actually doing. In practice, the number of worthwhile campaigns can change a lot from week to week.
We have argued before that the calendar should come after the analysis rather than before it. The same applies to how many emails you send: there is no number that is right in advance.
One week, there may be very little worth sending. Another week, you may notice several different customer groups behaving in ways that deserve a response.
Each of those is a different opportunity, and they should lead to different campaigns.
That is why email frequency should not begin with a fixed weekly number. It should come from the customer behavior you are seeing and the business events that genuinely need communication.
Do not start with a fixed number of campaigns
A lot of email programs are built around a recurring cadence. The team decides it will send two or three campaigns every week, then fills the calendar around that number.
The problem is that the calendar can start driving the marketing instead of the other way around.
A recurring slot for a lifecycle group is different: the audience condition repeats, and the data decides who meets it this month. What does not work is fixing the number of sends before you have looked at anything.
If there are only one or two useful reasons to communicate this week, there is little value in inventing another promotion just to fill an empty slot. If several customer groups are showing meaningful changes in behavior, limiting yourself to two campaigns can be equally arbitrary.
The better approach is to first look at what is happening across the customer base and the business, then decide how many campaigns those opportunities justify.
Different customer behaviors can justify different campaigns
Suppose a brand notices that customers who previously bought running shoes have started spending much more time browsing running apparel.
That could justify a campaign for that group.
At the same time, another group of customers may normally replenish a product every 55 to 60 days, but their recent behavior shows that they are returning around day 30 and purchasing larger quantities.
That is a different pattern and a different campaign opportunity.
You might also find:
- first-time buyers reaching the point when similar customers usually make a second purchase
- regular customers whose purchase frequency has started to slow
- previous buyers showing new interest in a complementary category
- high-value customers responding unusually strongly to a recently launched product
These groups should not be bundled into one generic campaign simply because the brand wants to send something that week. Each behavior tells you something different about what a particular group of customers may want or need next.
If you find two useful patterns, you have two campaigns. If you find ten, you now have ten. Customer behavior should influence the count, not a static calendar.
Several signals can point to the same opportunity
More behavioral signals do not automatically mean more campaigns.
Suppose a group of customers is approaching its normal replenishment window. Those same customers have also started browsing the product again, and some have added it to cart.
Technically, those are different signals, but they all point toward the same purchase.
You would not necessarily send a replenishment campaign, a browse-abandonment email, and a cart email simply because all three conditions have appeared. Instead, the signals help you understand how strong the purchase intent has become and which message now makes the most sense.
If the customer has already added the product to cart, the cart communication may take priority. The replenishment timing and browsing behavior still matter because they give you more context, but they do not each need their own email.
The goal is to combine signals into a better decision, not turn every signal into another send.
Planned campaigns still matter
Tracking customer behavior does not mean every campaign needs to start there.
Your brand will still have things it wants to communicate: product launches, restocks, new collections, promotions, seasonal events, and important brand updates.
Those campaigns should remain part of the calendar. Customer behavior should help decide how broadly they are sent and how they are adapted.
Take a new product launch: the launch date comes from the business, but the audience does not have to be the entire list.
- Customers who already buy from that category may be obvious candidates.
- Customers who have recently started browsing related products may also be relevant.
Other customers may have shown no interest at all.
Since the launch is planned in advance, the customer data can help decide who should receive it, what they should see, and whether a follow-up makes sense.
That is how business-led campaigns and behavior-led campaigns can work together instead of competing for space on the calendar.
A brand can send many campaigns without sending every customer many emails
This is where email volume can easily be misunderstood. If a brand runs ten campaigns in one week, that does not mean everyone on the list receives ten emails.
One campaign may go to customers approaching a replenishment window, one may go to first-time buyers showing signs that they are ready for a second purchase, and another may target previous buyers who have started showing interest in a new category.
The brand is running more campaigns because it has found more distinct opportunities across different customer groups. Each customer should still receive only the campaigns that are relevant to them.
Campaigns and flows need to be considered together
The customer does not care whether an email came from a scheduled campaign or an automated flow; they simply experience another message from the brand.
That means campaign planning has to take browse abandonment, cart abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment, welcome, and other flows into account.
- A customer who has just added their usual replenishment product to cart may no longer need the replenishment campaign that was about to go out.
- Someone who has just purchased should stop receiving messages designed to persuade them to make that same purchase.
- A customer in the middle of an important post-purchase journey may not need a broad promotional email on the same day.
The different parts of the email program need to know enough about the customer’s current situation to avoid competing with each other.
Sending more only works when the targeting gets better
There is still a cost to getting frequency wrong.
Baymard’s 2022 survey of 2,473 US shoppers found the two most common reasons people unsubscribe are the overall volume of email they receive (59%) and emails coming too often from one specific retailer (51%).
That does not mean the answer is to choose a low weekly limit and apply it to everyone. The experience of receiving ten broad promotions is very different from receiving one or two emails that are closely tied to what you are actually doing.
As campaign volume increases, the targeting needs to become more precise.
There is also an option most brands skip. The same research found that 80% of ecommerce sites do not let customers adjust how often they receive newsletters. A frequency preference replaces your guess with what the customer has actually told you, and it applies to one person at a time rather than to the whole list.
Watch what happens to:
- unsubscribe rates
- spam complaints
- click rates
- conversion
- revenue per recipient
- repeat-purchase behavior
If those numbers begin to weaken, the problem may be that campaigns are reaching people who do not have enough reason to receive them, or that too many messages are competing for the same customers at once.
So how many emails should you send?
There is no useful weekly or monthly number that applies to every ecommerce brand. A quiet week may produce no meaningful campaign opportunity, whereas another week may produce several.
If you find six distinct behavioral opportunities and two important business-led campaigns, eight campaigns are perfectly reasonable, provided they are going to the right customer groups.
If several signals are all pointing to the same behavior, they should usually strengthen one campaign rather than create several. Similarly, if customer behavior makes a planned campaign irrelevant, that campaign should be changed or suppressed.
What matters is that every campaign has a clear reason to exist and a customer group with a clear reason to receive it.
Nexie is a retention marketing agent for e-commerce brands. It reads your customer data across engagement, recency, category interest and lifetime value together, surfaces the audiences worth campaigning to, and builds those campaigns for your team to review and approve, inside the guardrails and marketing policies you set. See how it works →