Email fatigue: the conversation killer

Imagine this scenario. Your best friend shoots you an email about going on a beach getaway together. You’ve been super busy at work and can’t help but agree that you need some R&R so you email her back. She replies to keep the conversation going but you’re mid-meeting so you leave it for later. By the time you get back to it she’s sent you 10 more emails about it. Yeesh, relax Susan.

The next day she emails you about it again. Then again, and again, and again. Now you don’t even want to go. She’s being super annoying. You’re not even sure you like beaches anymore. Or vacations.

Sound terrible?

It is terrible!

But here’s some bad news. There’s a good chance your brand is being Susan right now. Your customers are interested in your product. Maybe they even want to hang out and go on that trip together. And there you are... emailing them... every day... about the same stuff. You might even be confusing them with conflicting messages but that’s a whole other post. Either way your over-communication is turning into a problem. Your customers don’t want to hear from you anymore, let alone buy anything from you.

Couldn’t be you? Not your brand? I sure hope not but it’s probably happening more than you think. And unfortunately email fatigue is just the tip of the iceberg. It can also lead to:

• Your critical product message getting lost in a shuffle of webinar invites and white papers
• Getting spam-blocked by a customer’s whole domain, which means not even your sales reps can email their own accounts (good luck with that one at the next QBR)
• Spending budget to backfill the database because of your unsubscribe rate
• Upsetting a high-risk account even more, right in the middle of their renewal

The list goes on…

So what’s our point? Over-emailing is bad and there’s a decent chance you’re doing it even if you have checks in place. It starts as dipping open and click rates and before long it’s blocklists and blown deals.

Other symptoms to watch for

Still not sure? Here are a few other signs to look out for.

Open rate

Open rate = emails opened ÷ emails delivered

If this number has been trending down over time it may be a sign of email fatigue. Customers are getting less interested in your content and starting to ignore your emails.

One caveat. Open rates have been a lot less reliable since 2021 when Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection started loading emails automatically for a lot of Apple Mail users and every one of those counts as an open whether anyone read the email or not. Eloqua does keep those machine opens separate from real ones now so make sure you know which number you’re looking at and give clicks and unsubscribes more weight.

Click-through rate

Click-through rate = clicks ÷ emails delivered

Fewer people clicking on your emails is another sign that interest is fading. And since clicks are a more honest signal than opens these days, if clicks are sliding while opens hold steady you should probably assume the clicks are telling the truth.

Unsubscribes

Unsubscribe rate = unsubscribes ÷ emails delivered

This one is super important and a great indicator of email fatigue. If your unsubscribe rate is climbing you likely have an email fatigue problem on your hands and you’re going to spend a lot of marketing budget winning those people back or replacing them. After all it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. Somewhere between five and 25 times cheaper according to Harvard Business Review.

And too many emails is the most common reason people leave. When MarketingSherpa asked 2,400 consumers why they unsubscribe from companies’ emails the top answer was “too many emails in general” at 26%. Another 19% said they got too many from that company in particular.

The same survey found that 49% of people would rather pick how often they hear from a brand themselves. More on that in a minute.

Spam complaints

Spam complaint rate = spam complaints ÷ emails delivered

This is the one that can really hurt. Some people won’t bother looking for the unsubscribe link and will just hit “report spam” instead. Mailbox providers watch that number closely. Google tells bulk senders to keep their spam rate below 0.1% and never let it reach 0.3% and says inbox placement is likely to suffer once you’re over 0.1%. That affects everyone you email and not just the people who complained.

Fatigue Level

If you’re on Eloqua ask Oracle Support to turn on Fatigue Analysis. Every week it scores each contact on a scale from Inactive to Oversaturated based on how much email they’ve been sent and how often they open it. When more and more of your contacts land in the Saturated and Oversaturated levels that’s about as clear a warning as you’re going to get. Our guide to Fatigue Analysis explains how it works and what to do about it.

Why it happens even when you have rules

Most teams we talk to already have some kind of rule in place. Maybe it’s a suppression list or a filter that skips anyone who already got three emails this week. And on a quiet week that works fine.

The catch is that each campaign checks the rule on its own. If two campaigns reach the same contact at the same time both checks pass before either email has gone out and the contact gets both. On a busy week (a product launch, a big event, the end of the quarter) this happens constantly. We go into the details in our guide to email frequency limits in Eloqua.

There’s a people side too. Product marketing, events, field marketing and customer success all email the same contacts and each team only sees its own calendar. Nobody is looking at the total so nobody notices when it gets out of hand.

What to do about it

Email fatigue is very fixable though. A few things make a big difference:

• Set a limit and make it everyone’s limit. Decide how many emails a contact can get in a week and make sure every team’s campaigns stick to that same number. If only one team follows the rule you don’t really have a rule.
• Decide what matters most. When someone’s at their limit the renewal reminder should go out before the third webinar invite does. Agree on that order ahead of time and not in a chat thread on launch day.
• Give tired contacts a break. Contacts showing signs of fatigue should get fewer emails but not zero. Cut them off completely and they miss the things they actually care about.
• Let people choose. Remember that 49%? A preference center that lets contacts pick how often they hear from you and not just which topics can keep a lot of people from hitting unsubscribe. Eloqua’s subscription management handles topics well. Frequency takes more work.
• Keep an eye on the numbers. Put opens, clicks, unsubscribes and complaints on a dashboard that someone looks at every week.

At DemandByte we create simple solutions to important problems and email fatigue is one we know well. The Email Governor applies one set of frequency limits across every governed campaign in your Eloqua instance and lets you set stricter limits for the segments that need them. When a contact hits their limit the email waits and gets retried later so it still reaches them without going over. Campaign priorities make sure the most important email goes first. It installs in your Eloqua instance in minutes and we’ll help you set up your first queues.

[The Email Governor] has increased our email effectiveness and reduced our opt-out rate.

If you think you’ve got an email fatigue problem reach out and we’ll help you sort it out.