I hardly do it. I should do it more often.

I run a community and sell digital products (but it's not a SaaS product), so take this with a grain of salt.

I send an email every time:

• I upload a new workshop in the community
• there's a live event (workshop, hot seat, fireside chat, etc.)
• I want them to vote on what I create next or which workshops they most want
• we hit a new milestone in the community (usually new members)
• it's someone's business birthday (but only that person because that'd be feral lol)

For non-community digital products, I have a pretty standard email automation to make sure people are getting the value from the product, if they have any questions, and to invite them to upgrade to one of the paid communities. After that, I email customers every time I update the product (typically 2-4 times a year). I've gotten sales from these emails (everything from additional product sales, 1:1 consulting, and done-for-you services).

People are allowed to unsubscribe or change their notification frequency if they don't want to hear from you. I find people appreciate personalized value :)

It's pretty simple for me: as soon as I have something to say in the email format, so when enough updates are shipped.

As a SaaS user, I would be interested in a digest with new updates, but not often than twice per month. Otherwise, there is a big chance I'll unsubscribe.

I used to send a lot (like every week or so) but I've stopped doing that as it would take me a lot of time to write good emails and send them out.

Instead I am focusing on social media with small releases all the time. Eventually I will send a 'big' email with everything that was released each month, but still trying to make it work so that it doesn't take all of my energy.

Honestly not nearly enough

Experimented with it before though and had poor results

Now with 23k emails I can't bring myself to spend $400 a month on Klaviyo just to have poorly performing campaigns

I created a Discord for Blog Recorder where I share what I'm working on and also when it has shipped, but I should also really start doing product update emails soon. I would probably do it at most 1x per month with all the new stuff.

Years ago, I created #noticeable (noticeable.io) to help with this.

From my experience and what I have seen, some companies publish updates as soon as they have something new, while others aggregate updates over a week or a month. This usually depends strongly on your speed to ship, implement, or deploy new features.

To answer your question, yes, it reactivates old users. That's why more and more companies are maintaining a changelog and sharing product updates. Numbers really depend on the field you are in but, most importantly, on the content you send. There is no magic; if the content does not match users' interests, you will have wasted money sending an email. However, usually, the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.

The more you ship, the more often you can send product updates, and the more likely you will catch user interest. However, the trade-off is that users may consider your content as spam, especially if you send updates too frequently. Again, that's a trade-off, but if you play the game seriously, it pays off over time.

Regarding pricing, it does not have to be expensive. For example, with Noticeable, native email sending is supported starting with the Starter plan at $29/month. Sending 500 emails would cost an additional $2.50. In contrast, sending 23,000 emails would add $36.

Besides, note there are many channels to share product updates. Emails are a great way to reactivate users, as you mentioned. Automatic push notifications on social media are also a good option. To reduce churn, in-app notifications through widgets are also an option. Some services like Noticeable support pushing product updates to multiple channels with one click.

Check out Beehiiv’s emails — you get one like every week or two 😂. Very well structured as well.

I discussed this matter with my co-founder, and we had an additional question: Is it legal? In Europe, you have always to ask for permission to send emails. While transactional emails are exempt, this scenario does not fall under that category. Is the release of updates a transactional email? 🤔