Email fatigue is defined as the condition which a subscriber experiences when they get overwhelmed with incoming emails. It is believed to be one of the biggest reasons behind common email marketing anomalies, such as unsubscribes, low engagement rates, or even a rising number of spam reports. Today, we’ll learn all about the concept of email fatigue, its causes, and how, as an email marketer, you must avoid it.
What causes email fatigue?
Email fatigue most commonly occurs when the brands send irrelevant emails, or even useful emails but too frequently. Here are the elaborated reasons:
Irrelevant content
Your open and click-through rate will go down if your email’s content provides minimal value to subscribers. For instance, if your open rates remain stable, but CTR takes a dip, it is clear that your content makes the subscribers curious, but they find it irrelevant as soon as they open it. As per a report from Fluent LLC, “only 15% of users find email content useful in most cases.”
Incorrect frequency
The timing of your emails is essential but what’s more crucial is their frequency. As a brand, you should understand that it’s not just you who’s shooting emails to a particular subscriber, there is also an ocean of other brands. If it becomes too much to handle, the subscribers would just simply back off and, in worst cases, report you as spam as well.
According to a report from Return Path, even the most engaging subscribers (with an average open rate of 53%) find more than five emails from a given brand really overwhelming. The report also mentioned that around 91% of the unsatisfied subscribers simply leave a mailing list without raising any concerns. This phenomenon keeps email marketers in the dark, and they have no idea what went wrong.
The vicious practice of sending way too much and maybe irrelevant emails robs off your brand’s reputation, which eventually leads to unsuccessful email campaigns. Are you worried about losing your subscribers because of email fatigue? Professional services like Salesforce email specialists or Mailchimp email specialists would make the job much easier. Not just email fatigue, they are the wizards of email marketing on the whole.
That being sorted, let’s now look at some of the crucial practices that can save your subscribers from email fatigue and your email marketing campaigns from unsubscribes.
How can you avoid email fatigue?
Breaking down the metrics
The foremost thing to prevent email fatigue is by looking after your subscribers and providing them with the best content. Metric articulation helps a great deal in delivering quality content. Here is what you should look for while tracking down the performance of your email campaigns:
- open rate
- click-through rate
- unsubscribe rate
- spam complaint rate
Email metrics depend on multiple factors. Sometimes the design of your email can annoy the subscribers despite good textual content. In that case, you would observe a declining user engagement. In some cases, things might work in your favor, as well. Hence, it’s essential to have a keen and constant eye on your campaign metrics.
Segmenting the mail list
You cannot ignore the segmentation while trying to maintain the relevancy of your content. Dividing your subscribers based on their gender, language, country, and a lot more parameters helps you narrow down. You can now tailor-made content as per each group’s preference, which is an imperative factor in reducing email fatigue.
Asking questions to your subscribers is the best way to get into their heads. Get to know their behavior and create content specific to it.
Here’s an excellent example from Return Path on how you leave it on your subscribers to decide what type of content they want to receive in their inbox. This practice has two significant benefits. First, it reduces the chances of email fatigue since the subscribers would receive what they have opted for. Second, it would create a positive sentiment around your brand that you actually care for subscribers’ preferences and not just bombard them with emails of all sorts.
