How often should you send your email newsletter

So how often should you send your email newsletter?  I have seen recommendations from monthly, to weekly to several times a week.  I think the answer depends on the type of business you have, the size of your list and the nature of your emails.  As a mompreneur and small business owner, email marketing is an incredibly effective way of building a relationship and keeping contact with your market inexpensively.  You pretty much have to have some sort of program for email marketing.

But then there is the question of how often to actual email your list.  If you email them too infrequently, you don’t build up a relationship with them.  If you mail them too much, they might get sick of you and unsubscribe.    Of course, if you have something really important to tell them, they might not be bothered if you email them every day.

I was emailing 2 a week for GirlMogul and have decided to scale it back.  I noticed my open rates were going down and I was having a hard time coming up with content for those weekly newsletters.  But I will still mail once a week.  However I am changing it so that my in-depth article focused email goes out every other week – easier for me to come up with meaningful content.  Then I will send just an update on all the blog posts and contests I am running on the off week so people can visit the blog and keep entering the contest – and keep engaged.  I hope to realize some of the work on me – writing newsletters and blogging was a lot of work.  And with open rates going down and very few sales seeming to originate from the newsletters, I think this is the right decision for awhile.

Of course I will be monitoring my progress -will blog traffic dissipate, will open rates go up?  I’ll keep you posted – meanwhile any thoughts on how often a small business should be sending email newsletters?