Use an engagement-based sending schedule for optimal deliverability
Now that you understand what email engagement is, let’s put it into action to improve your sending strategy. Email marketing is all about following good sending practices while maximizing revenue generation potential. To do this successfully, you should create a sending cadence for your business that uses a variety of engagement tiers. The concept is simple: send to your most highly-engaged subscribers most often, and then send to less engaged subscribers less often.
Here’s a visual example to illustrate the concept:
Notice that in this case, we would only be sending messages to our full subscriber list a few times per year during very critical sales periods. For your weekly and monthly email sends, you should focus on smaller, more engaged customer segments. Learn more about how to create an engagement-based sending schedule that is tailored to your email sending cadence. Read on for more tips and best practices on how to improve your sending strategy.
Send targeted campaigns based on properties or past behavior
The possibilities with segmentation go far beyond just engagement metrics. Use your customer data to inform the topics of campaigns that you send. If you notice a downward trend in sales of a particular product, design a campaign around that particular product and target a segment of customers who have shown interest on your site by viewing that product.
Do you collect shopping preferences or customer interests through sign-up forms? Use those profile properties to your advantage by creating content that speaks to those specific interests. A few ideas of curating and targeting are:
- Location
- Previous purchase history
- Viewed Product history
- Favorite color
- Who they are shopping for
- Reason for shopping (birthday, anniversary, fun)
Exclude people who have recently made a purchase from promotions
Have you ever received a promotional email or advertisement for a product that you just purchased? This is both irritating for the customer who receives the message, and waste of money on behalf of the business. You can avoid this by simply creating a segment that identifies customers who have placed an order at least once in the last 7 days, and then excluding this segment from messages that are heavily promotional.
You can even do this for a specific product if you are planning to send promotional emails about one specific item in your shop. Put yourself in the customer's shoes and they will thank you.
Avoid daily sending to the same subscribers
Think about the last time you unsubscribed from a brand’s mailing list. Why did you unsubscribe? Were you inundated with daily emails trying to get you to buy something? Or worse, maybe you got 3 separate emails all in the same day from the same brand. Research the top reasons why people unsubscribe, and you'll notice that “too many emails” is a common theme.
Sending campaigns to the same customers every day is generally not considered an industry best practice. It can lead to list fatigue, and subscribers may stop engaging with your content altogether.
Daily sending to the same customers should be reserved for experiences where frequent emails are part of the value. For example, a 30-day challenge like this barista program sets a clear expectation that subscribers will receive a daily message with a new lesson or task. Because customers knowingly opt in to this type of structured, time-bound experience, daily sending feels helpful and intentional rather than overwhelming.
Send consistently
Consistency is key. Our best practice recommendation is to send at minimum 1 email campaign per week. If you aren't currently sending one a week, ramp up your sending cadence over time. Don’t go from sending 1 campaign a month to suddenly sending 5 or 6 campaigns a week. These spikes in email volume are common tactics used by malicious senders, and inbox providers will likely place your messages in the spam folder.
Steadily increase your sending cadence over the course of 30 or 60 days until you reach a manageable cadence of sending once, or even two or three times per week.
Meanwhile, if you go dark for 30 days or more and you may need to re-warm your sending domain entirely. If you plan to increase or decrease your cadence, do so gradually. You should either slowly ramp up or decrease your email volume over time to maintain a strong sender reputation.