AI can write 50 emails before lunch. Please don’t send all of them.

Think back to what it took to get a single nurture email out the door a few years ago. Someone wrote a brief. A copywriter got to it when they could. Product marketing had notes and legal had different notes. Then it went to design, then to whoever built it, then out as a test send to six people who all replied pointing out the same typo.

Two weeks if you were lucky.

Nobody misses that. But all of that waiting was quietly doing a job nobody had assigned to it. It kept a lid on how much email you could send. You couldn’t email a contact five times a week because you couldn’t write five emails a week. The bottleneck was doing your frequency planning for you.

The bottleneck is gone

Today a marketer can open an AI writing tool, describe the campaign and have a draft with three subject lines and a version for every persona before their coffee gets cold. Then a follow-up for the people who didn’t open, a version for EMEA and a “just checking in” for the people who clicked but never registered. And honestly most of it reads pretty well.

I’m not going to tell you to stop. We build one of these tools ourselves. Campaign Launchpad lets marketers write copy with AI inside rules their marketing ops team set up ahead of time and I think faster content is a good thing.

What changes is the decision about whether to send. Once an email costs next to nothing to make, people start thinking about that differently.

“It’s already written, so why not send it?”

When an email took two weeks teams were choosy about which ones were worth the effort. Now the draft is just sitting there finished and leaving it unsent feels like a waste. So the extra follow-up goes out, then the persona variant, then the reminder about the reminder.

Each of those calls makes sense on its own. The trouble is how many people are making them. Product marketing has AI now. So do events, field marketing, customer success and the partner team. Every one of them can turn out more email than they ever could before and every one of them is looking at their own calendar rather than the contact’s inbox.

Take a modest example. Five teams each sending a customer two emails a week adds up to ten. Give each team an AI assistant and a bit of enthusiasm and that turns into twenty without anyone trying very hard. Nobody sat down and decided the customer should get twenty emails a week. It just sort of happened.

Five teams each sending a reasonable amount of email is still one company sending too much.

Sending more stops working pretty quickly

It’s tempting to treat every extra send as one more shot at a conversion. Up to a point that’s even true. Past that point each new email is mostly competing with the ones you already sent and people stop opening any of them.

After that it gets expensive:

• People unsubscribe. The email that finally pushes them over the edge is rarely the one you’d have chosen to lose them over.
• Some of them hit “report spam” instead, which hurts every email you send afterwards and not just the one they reported. Google for one tells bulk senders to keep their spam rate below 0.1% and never let it reach 0.3%.
• The people who stay just stop paying attention. They still count as subscribers so this one is easy to miss in your reports.
• The emails that matter get buried. Your product launch or renewal notice lands in the same pile as the fourth webinar invite of the week.

Eloqua’s Fatigue Analysis will show you which contacts are wearing out and that’s useful. It just doesn’t stop anyone from emailing them.

The hard question has changed

The question used to be whether we could get the email made at all. Now it’s whether this particular one should go out and to whom and whether it matters more than everything else already queued up for the same people.

That’s a governance question and in most companies nobody has that job. Each team owns its own campaigns and nobody owns the total. Penny wrote about this in Who owns the inbox? if you want the longer version.

If you’re putting AI in front of your marketers, and you probably should be, put a few other things in place at the same time:

1. Find out where you are today. Pull the Email Frequency numbers out of Eloqua Insight and look at how many emails your contacts really got last month. Look at the most-emailed 10% rather than the average because the average hides the people you’re burning out.
2. Set one limit for everyone. An actual cap on how many emails a contact can get in a week that every team’s campaigns have to respect, as opposed to a guideline on a wiki page that everyone read once. Eloqua doesn’t have a setting for this out of the box so it takes some planning.
3. Decide what wins. When a contact only has room for one more email this week the renewal notice should beat the newsletter. Agree on that order before launch day rather than during it.
4. Go easier on tired contacts. Someone who’s already tuning out should be getting fewer emails than everyone else. A lower limit for fatigued segments works a lot better than cutting them off completely.
5. Use the time AI gives back. The hours that used to go into first drafts can go into targeting, testing and reading what you’re about to send before it goes out.

Put the brakes back on

The old bottleneck kept volume down without anyone meaning it to. It was slow and painful and nobody wants it back. The job it was doing still needs doing though and now somebody has to take it on deliberately.

That’s what we built the Email Governor for. You set how many emails a contact can get in a given period and tighter limits for whichever segments need them. Every governed campaign in your Eloqua instance then has to work within those numbers. When a contact is at their limit the email is held back and retried later so it can still reach them without going over. Campaign priorities decide which email goes first.

Our overall frequency has gone down while engagement rates have gone up.

Let your teams write as much as they like. Somebody just has to make sure your contacts only get the ones worth their time.