"How often should we send?" is one of the first questions every new newsletter faces. There's no universal number, but for a small business there is a practical answer: as often as you can keep doing it, and no more often than you have something worth saying.
Start with what you can sustain
A newsletter that arrives every month for two years builds more trust than a weekly one that quietly stopped after six issues. Readers notice when you disappear, and restarting after a long gap often brings a wave of unsubscribes and spam reports from people who forgot they signed up.
A simple way to decide:
- Monthly if you publish a few updates a month on your website. This is the safest starting point.
- Every two weeks if you have a steady flow of news, articles or offers.
- Weekly only if you have new material every week and someone (or something) to put it together reliably.
Match frequency to your material
The right frequency follows from how much you actually have to say. If you have to invent content to fill a weekly slot, readers will feel it. A good rule: every issue should include at least two or three things a reader would genuinely want to know, such as a new product, a useful article, an event or a customer story. If you can't fill an issue, send less often.
Tell readers what to expect
Say how often you'll send on your sign-up form, for example "One email a month with our latest news." It sets expectations, so readers aren't surprised, and it makes people who sign up more likely to stay.
Signs you're sending too often
Watch these numbers after each issue:
- Unsubscribes jump after an issue, compared with your usual level.
- Spam complaints rise. Gmail and Yahoo both expect senders to keep spam complaints below 0.3% of messages. Going over that hurts your delivery to everyone on your list.
- Clicks keep falling over several issues, even though the content is similar.
Open rates are less reliable as a signal, because privacy features such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection load emails in the background and count them as opened.