When your emails start arguing with each other

When I wrote about email fatigue I promised we’d come back to conflicting messages. So here we go.

Picture this. You finally buy the car you’ve been eyeing for months. That afternoon the dealership emails to say thanks for your business. Nice touch. An hour later a different email from the same dealer offers you $2,000 off the exact car you just bought. The next morning the service department wants to know why you haven’t booked your first oil change. The car has 14 miles on it.

Nobody at that dealership did anything wrong exactly. Sales sent the thank-you, marketing sent the promotion and service sent the reminder. Each one made sense to the person who built it. Put them together though and the dealer looks like it has no idea who you are. And now you’re wondering whether you should have waited a week for the discount.

What it looks like in B2B

Swap the car for software and I bet some of these look familiar:

• A customer gets a renewal notice at full price on Monday and a “20% off your first year” promotion on Wednesday.
• Someone who registered for your webinar yesterday gets two more emails asking them to register.
• A brand-new customer two weeks into onboarding lands in the “Still thinking it over?” nurture meant for prospects.
• Your most active user gets the “We miss you!” win-back email.
• Product marketing announces that a feature is being retired and the next week the newsletter promotes it.
• The account you’re trying to save after a rough support case gets a cheerful upsell right in the middle of it.

All of these happen for the same reason. Each email was right for the list it went to and nobody checked what else that person was getting.

Why it’s worse than too much email

Fatigue is a volume problem and you fix it by sending less. Contradictions are different. They cost you in ways that are harder to see in a report:

• Trust, for a start. If you can’t keep your own messages straight why would a customer trust you with their data or their renewal or their budget?
• Money. A customer who sees a discount right after paying full price asks for a refund or waits for the next promotion before buying anything else.
• Your sales team’s time. Reps end up on calls explaining which email to ignore instead of selling.
• And your list. Once people can’t tell which of your emails matter they stop reading all of them and eventually they unsubscribe.

How it happens

In my experience it’s almost never carelessness. In most large marketing teams it comes down to three things.

Every team builds its audience separately. Events pulls a list for the webinar. Customer marketing pulls one for the renewal campaign. Demand gen pulls one for the promotion. The same person ends up on all three and nothing connects them.

Nobody can see the whole picture. Each team knows what it’s sending. Very few people can look up a contact and see everything that’s going to them this week from every team.

Your data runs behind reality. The purchase went into the CRM this morning but the next sync to your marketing platform hasn’t run yet. The registration came in an hour ago but the reminder campaign pulled its list yesterday. For a few hours or sometimes a few days your emails are going to a version of that person who doesn’t exist anymore.

And it’s getting harder. Now that every team can write more email than ever with AI there are more chances for two campaigns to collide. Byron wrote about that in AI can write 50 emails before lunch.

How to stop your emails from arguing

You’re never going to get two campaigns to read each other’s copy. What you can do is make sure they don’t reach the same person at the wrong moment.

1. List the moments that matter. Onboarding, an open renewal, a recent purchase, an open support case, an event registration. Those are the times a contradictory email does the most damage.
2. Decide what pauses during each one. A customer in their renewal window shouldn’t get discount offers. A new customer shouldn’t get prospect nurtures. Someone who already registered shouldn’t get the invitation again. Write it down so it isn’t up to each campaign builder to remember.
3. Build those rules once and share them. In Eloqua that usually means shared segments or filters that every campaign excludes, owned by marketing ops instead of rebuilt by each team. When every team makes its own version the versions drift apart.
4. Put one team in charge of offers. Most contradictions involve a discount. If one team decides what gets offered to whom then at least the numbers will match.
5. Make the schedule visible. A shared calendar of what’s going to which audiences catches a lot of collisions before they happen and costs you nothing.
6. Close the data gap. Check how often your CRM sync runs and whether the fields your exclusions depend on are part of it.

Where the Email Governor helps

I’ll be honest, the Email Governor isn’t going to proofread your campaigns against each other and I don’t know of anything that will. What it does do is give marketing ops one place to control what reaches each contact and when.

Every governed campaign goes through queues with priorities so when a contact has room for one more email the renewal notice goes out before the promotion. Frequency limits keep the total down which leaves fewer emails to contradict each other in the first place. And the calendar lays out campaign activity by day across the whole instance so you can spot a crowded week before anyone schedules another send into it. Crowded weeks are where most collisions happen anyway.

Your customers can’t see your org chart and they don’t care about it either. To them you’re one company and they expect it to remember what it told them yesterday. If that’s not what they’re getting from you then let’s talk.