How often should you email your customers?
Most businesses either go silent or send too much. The case for emailing a few times a year, on purpose, and how to actually remember to do it.
The uncomfortable truth about your last newsletter
Most of the people who didn't reply to your last email saw it. They opened it on their phone in line for coffee, thought "not right now," and moved on. They weren't offended. They weren't uninterested. They were busy, the same way you are when a vendor emails you.
Most email advice draws exactly the wrong conclusion from this: send more. Weekly newsletters, five-touch sequences, "just bumping this to the top of your inbox." The theory is that frequency buys attention. In practice it buys the archive button, and eventually the spam report, which quietly wrecks your ability to reach the people who did want to hear from you.
A few times a year is plenty
For most small businesses (agencies, trades, consultancies, local services) the honest cadence is somewhere between once a month and a few times a year. That's enough to stay recognizable. When your email does arrive, it's an event, not a chore: a real update, a seasonal reminder, a piece of news worth the interruption.
The rules that fall out of that:
- One email after someone reaches out or signs up. Confirm you exist, say what happens next. Not a sequence. One email, written like a person.
- Then silence until you have something worth saying. A new service, changed hours, a genuinely useful seasonal note.
- Never let a good contact go a year without hearing from you. This is the actual failure mode. Not under-mailing, but forgetting people entirely.
The real problem is remembering
Sending less often has one hard part: memory. When you send weekly, you can't forget anyone. When you send three times a year, it's easy to discover that a customer who loved you in March hasn't heard from you since, and has meanwhile hired someone who stayed in touch.
So the tooling you need isn't an automation engine. It's a simple answer to one question: who haven't I emailed in a while? Your CRM should show, at a glance, which subscribed contacts have gone three or six months without a word (counting real replies from your inbox, not just bulk sends) and let you write to exactly those people.
That's how broadcasts work in KruxCRM: pick "contacts I haven't emailed in six months," compose one plain-text email, send. Because sending updates each contact's last-emailed date, running the same broadcast next quarter automatically skips everyone the last one reached. It won't let you email the same person too often, even if you don't think about it.
What to send, when you do send
- Plain text. It reads like an email from a person, renders everywhere, and reaches the inbox more reliably than a designed template.
- One topic. If you saved up three announcements, you waited too long, or you're padding.
- A reason to reply. End with a question or an offer. Replies land in your shared inbox and turn a broadcast into conversations.
- A working unsubscribe. Non-negotiable, and legally required. People who opt out were never going to buy; let them go gracefully.
If you're tempted to scale this up with drip campaigns instead, read Do you really need marketing automation? first.