Are We Approaching Peak Email Marketing Frequency?

For the nearly two decades I’ve been in the email marketing industry, everyone has always fretted about whether or not they’re sending too much email—and then they’ve gone ahead and sent more email.

A few years ago, I spoke to a reporter who was convinced that email frequency was absolutely out of control. I explained that inbox providers and subscribers are the ultimate arbiters of how much is too much.

Inbox providers start junking and blocking a sender’s emails if they see too low of a positive engagement rate from their users, such as opens, dwell time, forwards, and foldering—or too high of a negative engagement rate in the form of spam complaints. And subscribers opt out if they get too little value from a sender’s messages. Email frequency has a huge impact on both of those perceptions.

That’s still true today, but there are now other forces at work that seem to be finally slowing email frequency growth—and in some cases even reversing it. Here are the four major trends at work:

1. Omnichannel Expansion

More brands are rolling out and growing SMS and mobile push programs, which attract some customers and prospects who would have otherwise signed up for email. But more than that, a growing number of people are opting into email and SMS or push—or all three.

That increasing overlap means brands have to be way more thoughtful about the messages they’re sending in each channel, so they avoid senselessly repetitive and redundant messaging. In some cases, which means shifting some messages to SMS and push from email, which is by far the incumbent channel among both consumers and brands.

2. More Automated Campaigns

An increasing number of brands have grown their triggered email programs to the point that they get upwards of 25% or even the majority of their email marketing revenue from these campaigns, which typically represent less than 5% of their overall email marketing volume. Gains in these programs are taking some pressure off the need to send so many broadcast promotional campaigns.

Moreover, since the vast majority of opt outs are generated by promo campaigns, over-sending them directly jeopardizes that growing triggered email revenue. That reality is also putting a check on frequency growth.

3. More Thoughtful Contact Strategies

Collectively, smarter inactivity management along with AI-driven fatigue analysis and predictive activity modeling reduce the number of emails going to less engaged subscribers and increase the number going to engaged ones. On net, those strategies significantly reduce email volume while maintaining or increasing email marketing revenue.

For instance, The Vitamin Shoppe took this approach during the holiday season and increased their email revenue by 25% while reducing email volume by 20%. Many more brands are discovering they can do the same and are enjoying not only the higher revenue, but lower sending costs and lower churn, the latter of which boosts subscriber lifetime value.

4. New Frequency-Discouraging Inbox Features

The one external source of pressure to reduce email frequency is coming from inbox providers. For instance, as part of Apple Mail’s iOS 18 updates last year, Apple introduced Brand Message Grouping. When a subscriber is using “Categories” instead of “List View,” their inbox is organized using tabs and using Brand Message Grouping, which groups all of a brand’s emails under one message heading.

It’s recognizable by the bullet points under the sender name. Each bullet point is an email’s subject line, with up to two shown. But they’re not the subject lines for the most recent emails, which is a major problem with Apple’s approach. Clicking into a grouping often drops you into the middle of a long preview list of emails that’s very disorienting and not user-friendly.

Apple generally only groups emails for what it considers “Older Messages,” but sometimes everything in a tab is lumped under that heading, including messages that arrived yesterday or even as little as 2 hours ago.

Google is also trying to discourage high-frequency sending. In July, they introduced a new Manage Subscriptions feature that brings up a list of brands you’re subscribed to. The brands are listed according to their sending frequency, but only in a very general way.

Google lists each sender as having sent “20+ emails recently,” “10-20 emails recently,” or “10 or fewer emails recently.” Ignoring the fact that those last two categories overlap, “recently” isn’t defined and in at least one case was a time period of more than 4 months. That leads to huge variations in frequency in the “20+ emails recently” group, with one sender falling into that bucket because they sent 20 emails and another because they sent, say, 80. However, those details are completely hidden, despite Google obviously having that information.

Even worse, the listing makes you think the sender listed first sent the most email, and by unsubscribing from them you’ll see the biggest reduction in email in your inbox. That will rarely be the case as senders are listed alphabetically within each frequency group. I can tell you for a fact that my Email Marketing Rules newsletter is not the second highest frequency sender I receive emails from in my Gmail account, as the Manage Subscriptions list below suggests.

Unfortunately, this puts brands whose sender names come early alphabetically at a significant disadvantage versus brands whose sender names fall near the end. The imprecision of the Manage Subscriptions list makes it difficult for brands to make informed decisions about reducing their send frequencies, but that’s clearly part of Google’s goal.

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Today, while still rare, it’s not hard to find brands who have significantly reduced their email frequency. They represent the leading edge of a wave that will grow in size over the next few years as the trends above take greater hold. The age of sending-more-emails-means-more-revenue is coming to an end.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash