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More Emails, More Sales? The Surprising Argument For Aggressive Email Marketing. Don't worry about annoying your customers. The data says they don't hate email.

By Lissa Harris

This story appears in the October 2017 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Viktor Koen

Don't annoy your customers. If there's a cardinal rule of email marketing, that's it. Thus, most marketers describe the ideal email strategy as a careful balancing act between frequency and engagement. Sure, you need to send enough emails to stay on the customer's radar. But send too many and your subscribers will flee, your click and open rates will plummet and you will find yourself branded a common spammer.

For a time, Dela Quist shared this fear. Quist, CEO of British and U.S. email marketing firm Alchemy Worx, "started out where everyone else did, worrying about open rates and trying to get them as high as possible," he says. Then he began digging into the numbers, looking at client campaigns for evidence that a business could get better results by sending less email.

Related: 8 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Performance