How Often Should I Actually Send My Newsletter?

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How often should you actually send your newsletter? The short, unsatisfying answer is: It depends.

The long answer is a little bit more complicated. I think it comes down to four key factors:

1. How much time do you have to produce this newsletter?
2. How much content is there to cover in each newsletter?
3. How popular is the topic you cover?
4. How do you monetize your newsletter?

Often, I find that the writers or teams behind a newsletter are sending at the wrong cadence, which means they’re not optimizing their newsletter strategy. So let’s go through each of these points and figure out whether you send as frequently as you should — or if you should think about scaling back!

How much time do you have to produce this newsletter?

Your answers to the rest of the questions below don’t really matter if you don’t have the time and resources to produce the newsletter.

Let’s say you want to produce a twice-weekly newsletter. The challenge, of course, is making time to sit down and write something. The content-creation part of the process might take a few hours per week, and that’s before you go to put it into your email platform, format everything, test all the links, and hit send. (Not to mention the time you’ll need to do all the rest of the stuff you do with the newsletter, like listening to your audience, growing your list, or working on monetization.)

At the start, everyone’s 100% committed to making time for writing. But building a newsletter is a lot like committing to a new fitness routine. Sure, you show up at the gym that first week. But what about when you’re a few weeks in, or when you’re tired, or you’re traveling?

My general rule: Assume that for every email you send, you’re going to need at least two to four hours to write and produce the newsletter. That might be an undercount, too: I often spend at least 5-10 hours working on the content that goes into each of my newsletters.

With most newsletters, it’s easier to start with a lesser cadence — say, weekly or twice-monthly — and then ramp up when you can commit more resources and time to producing things. And yes, it gets a lot easier to commit to a newsletter as your audience grows or the revenue from your newsletter grows.

It’s also fine to take breaks from your newsletter. (Plenty of successful newsletters have done so!) If you’re not sure if you can commit to an ongoing newsletter — something sent daily, weekly, etc. — you could always look to launch a short-run product, like a course or a pop-up newsletter, instead.

How much content is there to cover in each newsletter?

Not every topic is a goldmine for content. If you write a newsletter about business news or politics, you can probably fill a daily newsletter. But what about those more niche publications? It might be a lot harder to produce a great daily product about certain topics — there just isn’t enough content for a daily email. Plus, the more in-depth your newsletter goes, or the more editing or production time each issue requires, the more likely you are to lean into a less frequent sending cadence. If your newsletter is built around long personal essays or deep dives into a specific topic, you’re probably better off with a weekly or monthly cadence.

Format plays a key role in your decision, too. Formats that tend to work for daily (or daily-ish) kind of newsletters include:

• Short essays or advice
• Curated content
• Bulleted lists (like this one)

It’s not just about the length of the newsletter, though. There are plenty of daily newsletters that stretch 1,000 words or more. But the format is crucial — they might feature 10 stories, with 100-word summaries of the key takeaways for each. The combination of curation and summarization is easily repeatable, and it’s also easier for a reader to skim through on a daily basis than a long essay or investigation. (Even if you could produce a 2,000+ word daily email, would readers consistently make time to read it?)

How popular is the topic you cover?

When I think about the popularity of the topic you cover, I think you should ask two questions:

• Is there a lot of interest from your audience in the topic?
• Are there many other newsletters covering your topic?

Take one of the biggest topics of the moment: artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of public interest in the topic, and certainly lots of conversations about how to use AI in more niche fields. But there are also many newsletters about AI. (Beehiiv’s team said that more than 3,000 artificial intelligence newsletters launched on their platform just in 2023 — and that was in the early days of public interest in AI.)

So if you were launching an AI newsletter today, you’d probably think about two things. One is that you’d want to go niche — a newsletter featuring a list of ChatGPT prompts would compete against a lot of similar newsletters. But you’d also want to think about cadence. If other newsletters send shorter, daily emails, you might want to go with a longer, weekly send. Picking a different frequency is one way to help your newsletter stand out.

How do you monetize your newsletter?

Here’s one that many writers overlook. The way you monetize your newsletter can significantly affect your frequency.

The general rule: The more money you can make from each individual reader, known as the lifetime value of a subscriber, the less often you need to send. If you primarily make money through advertising, you probably want to send more regularly. 

Many newsletters sell based on a CPM, or cost per mille, basis, which means you charge the advertiser a set rate for every thousand readers who open the newsletter. Let’s say you have a high CPM: $50 per 1,000 opens. But if you break that down on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis, it means each reader who opens that day’s newsletter is only worth $0.05. (Keep in mind: That’s just the readers who open newsletters. Lots of readers only open occasionally, or not at all, so the value of a subscriber is worth less than that.) 

The back-of-the-envelope math means that at that rate, if you have a weekly newsletter, an engaged subscriber would be worth about $2.60 per year. 

But if you send five days a week, that subscriber would be worth $13.00 per year. It’s why newsletters that focus on advertising tend to send daily or at least a few times per week.

Other revenue models might give you more flexibility with sending frequency. Newsletters that rely on paid subscriptions, memberships, or donations tend to make more money per subscriber. You certainly could send daily, but your revenue model doesn’t require it. If you make money via big-ticket events, the same thing is true. If you run a consulting practice, like I do, a reader could actually be worth thousands of dollars. When I first started my newsletter, I sent monthly, but the value of my subscribers was high enough that I didn’t really need to send more than that.

So how often should you actually send?

All of this builds to the real question: What’s the right sending cadence for you?

Here are a few options along with some examples of the appropriate newsletter for each frequency:

• Multiple times per day — This might make sense if you’re a newsroom sending breaking news alerts or if you have a large team capable of producing morning and evening newsletters, but this probably doesn’t work for anyone else.
• Daily — This is a great option for newsrooms publishing a lot of content, or individual writers who want to send short notes or essays to their readers.
• Multiple times per week — This is one of the more common options for publishers who find that they have way too much to share if they only send weekly, but not enough to sustain a daily. A two- or three-day-a-week newsletter might be the Goldilocks zone for those teams. I also see a lot of indie newsletters lean into this cadence. One newsletter might be free for all readers, while the other goes out exclusively to paying supporters.
• Weekly —This is typically the most common sending frequency. Let’s say you’re a writer who puts together a big essay or analysis for your readers. Weekly is still enough to allow subscribers to build a reading habit, but it also isn’t overwhelming for the writer to produce.
• Twice-monthly — I see a lot of non-profits go this route. Many of those teams have enough updates and news to share that they need to send more than once a month — otherwise, that monthly email feels overstuffed with content. This is also a good option for an indie newsletter writer who’s getting started. As the audience grows, they might move to a weekly cadence, but twice-monthly can help prevent burnout as they build their list.
• Monthly — This isn’t a bad option for a company that wants to send occasional updates, a non-profit trying to stay in touch with readers, or the newsletter from a writer who’s mostly writing something for fun.
• Occasional — Some newsletters only go out when they have something to share. The downside is that you can’t really build a reading habit when readers don’t know when the newsletter will arrive. But the upside: The element of surprise (“Look, a new newsletter from that writer I love!”) can be fun for readers.
• Short-run — The final option: Build a newsletter that isn’t meant to go on forever. Many newsletters are pop-ups, built to last for just a few days or weeks and then disappear, or courses, which are automated and have a set end date. If you’re just getting started, one of these might be a way to build an audience and learn about their needs before launching an ongoing newsletter.

So how often should you send? I started this piece with a brief piece of advice (“It depends!”), and I’ll end with one more: The right cadence is one that you can stick with for a long time. Pick something that feels sustainable for you — and if things are (or aren’t) working, be willing to adjust.

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