How Often Should You Email Your List During a Launch?

Are you planning a launch but worried about annoying subscribers or burning out your list? Keep reading to find out how often you should email during your launch and learn my favorite tip to avoid upsetting your subscribers.

Launches vary widely depending on the strategy you’re using. You can have some launches that are like a flash sale that only last a day or two. You can also have ones that go on for a few weeks.

For the sake of this post, let's talk about a typical launch which usually lasts about 5 to 7 days. In that time you usually open the cart, promo really heavily for about a week, and then close the cart.

If your list is used to hearing from you just once or twice a week, it can feel like a lot to go from emailing them that often to emailing every day — sometimes more than once a day — during a launch. 

Some people come to me and ask if they really should be emailing this often. Should you spread out emails so people don’t get so many at once? And what about daily emails. Won’t that be annoying?  

Yes for some of your subscribers it might be annoying — but don't worry about them. I have an out for them at the end of this post.

But here's the real reason why you should be emailing every day: not everyone is going to see every email. 

Most of the people on your list are not opening and reading every single email. You’ll never get a 100 percent open rate. There's always a section of your list that's not opening and reading your emails and it's not always the same people.

When you're sending emails on different days and at different times, it hits different people on your list. So even if you have a 30 percent open rate, it doesn't mean it's just the same 30% of people that are always opening.

You can absolutely send your subscribers emails every day during the short promo period. It gives them ample opportunities to see what it is that you're offering, learn more about it, and decide to jump in if it's right for them.

Most of them will need a lot of reminders. There's a reason why the majority of your sales come on your last day. People are busy, people are waiting, people need that prodding and that urgency to actually take action.

Another reason you want to send out a lot of emails during your launch is that it gives you a chance to help build a bridge for people. 

Some people on your list may be interested in your offer, but they don't quite understand yet how it might work for them. They might have objections. They definitely have questions. Your emails can really do a lot of the work tackling this stuff.

If all you're doing is sending out a couple of emails like: Here’s the offer. Here's a reminder. It's closing soon. Last chance to buy — those emails aren't really helping them with this transformation. They're not illustrating the results that they could get and they're not helping them see how this helps them. 

You also want to fully serve the people on your list by answering questions that they have, talking through the objections that they have before buying and helping them feel really comfortable taking this next step.

And the truth is you can't really do all that stuff and just a few emails. So go ahead and freely send those emails!

Now, what about the people on your list who aren’t interested or are going to get annoyed with these daily emails? I've got two options for you. 

The first one is to just launch to an interest list. Before you launch, you might do some pre-launch content to build an interest list. Maybe you're hosting a webinar. Maybe you've got a opt-in lead magnet that is very closely tied to the offer that you're launching, and you're letting people opt into that rather than just sending the launch offer to your whole list. 

Basically, you're building like a smaller segment of your list that's more engaged and has told you: Yes, I'm interested in learning about this. When it comes time to launch, you're just sending emails to that portion of your list. You're not sending emails to the whole list that you have. That smaller segment of your list is more targeted, they’re more warmed up, and they have actually raised their hand and said they want to hear more about this topic. 

Another great thing you could do is give people an out. Maybe you want to launch to your whole list. If you're going to go that route, I recommend you give subscribers a way to opt-out of the promo without unsubscribing from your full list.

You can just add something really simple in the footer or the P.S. of every email during your launch. All you have to do is say something like “Not interested in XYZ launch? Click here to opt-out of these promo emails.” On the back end of your email service provider, you'll set up a custom link that when they click that they get opted out of your promo list, but they still get to stay on your main list.

By letting subscribers opt-out at any time during the launch you’ll have a lot fewer unsubscribes. You’ll typically see unsubscribes go up during the promo period but this trick can help save a few of those people that are loving your regular emails that are just not the right fit for whatever you're launching.

Use these tips the next time you launch!