Email frequency

Having permission to email someone is a real asset. Sending too often, or sending things people don't care about, erodes that permission quickly. Contacts who feel over-emailed either unsubscribe or stop opening, and silent non-openers are actually the more damaging outcome, because they quietly drag down your deliverability metrics over time.

Why this matters for deliverability

Email providers like Gmail track engagement signals, opens, clicks, and spam reports, to decide where your emails land. A list full of contacts who never open your emails is a liability. Consistent engagement from a smaller, well-matched audience will outperform a large, disengaged list every time.

Set and respect frequency expectations

The clearest way to manage frequency is to tell people what they're signing up for when they subscribe. If your opt-in form says "receive our weekly newsletter", send weekly. If you said monthly, send monthly.

Extra emails for special occasions are fine, a significant product update, a flash sale, an important announcement. But if every week brings a new reason to send an extra campaign on top of your regular schedule, you've stopped thinking about what your contacts want.

Use segmentation to reduce irrelevant sends

Sending to your entire database every time means sending to people for whom a given message has no relevance. Interests and segments let you match the right message to the right group, so each contact receives fewer emails overall, but every email they do receive is relevant to them.

Give contacts the option to specify their own preferences through public interests on their profile page. When people can choose what they receive, they're much less likely to unsubscribe or disengage.

Remove converted contacts from campaign sequences

If a contact clicked through and completed the action you were asking for, a purchase, a registration, a download, there's no value in continuing to send them the rest of the sequence. Use campaign reports and link tracking data to identify who converted, and use workflows or exclusion segments to remove them from follow-up sends.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Equating more sends with more revenue. Frequency beyond what your audience expects tends to increase unsubscribes and spam complaints, not conversions. More relevant sends at the right frequency outperform high-volume sending.
• Not telling subscribers how often they'll hear from you. Setting expectations at sign-up is one of the simplest ways to reduce unsubscribes and complaints later.
• Sending the same campaign to your full list when only a subset is relevant. Use interests and segments to target appropriately.
• Ignoring unsubscribe reasons. Flexmail captures why contacts leave. "Too many emails" is actionable data, use it.
• Continuing to send converted contacts the same promotional sequence. Once someone has acted, the sequence has served its purpose. Remove them.

Next steps

• Review your unsubscribe data in Contacts > Unsubscribe report to see if "too many emails" appears as a reason.
• Make sure your opt-in forms clearly state how often you'll send.
• Set up public interests so contacts can manage their own preferences rather than unsubscribing entirely.
• Use exclusion segments or workflow actions to remove converted contacts from ongoing sequences.