Email marketing fatigue: prevent subscribers from tiring of your messages

What is email fatigue?

Is no one reading your emails? Or do you feel as if your messages aren’t reaching your audience?

If the answer to both these questions is a resounding yes, you’re facing email fatigue. Email fatigue is most often caused by sending too frequently, thus overwhelming your subscribers with messages and causing them to abandon even trying to digest what you send. Most brands see the negative effects of email fatigue on their email marketing metrics around the holidays; however, it can happen at any time.

Email marketing fatigue – losing dedicated customers – is every brand’s worst nightmare. Without effective email marketing, open and click rates decrease, and revenue right along with it. So, how do you prevent email fatigue? And more importantly, how do you identify and stop it when it’s happening?

Fear not. We’ve got you covered with a thorough guide to email marketing fatigue and how to conquer it.

defining email fatigue

Your email list is your most valuable asset. It’s a privilege to connect with your subscribers on such an intimate level as email marketing – after all, your message goes into the same inbox where they read messages from their moms. They’ve chosen to give you their email addresses, showing a level of trust that deserves respect.

Flooding inboxes with marketing email after marketing email until your subscribers ignore you is called email fatigue. It’s the emotion those subscribers feel and the effect it has on your open and click rates. It’s a decidedly negative reaction from subscribers, and not a good place for any email marketing program to be in.

Creating a sense of email fatigue goes against everything a subscriber expects from you. And if you don’t personalize the experience – custom content, first name salutation – it just adds insult to injury.

identifying email fatigue

How do you know if your subscribers are suffering from email fatigue? The first major clue is low open rates for an extended period of time. If you’re tracking your email program’s benchmarks, you’ll know when your open rate dips. And if it continues to remain low, or drop even further, it’s an even clearer sign of email fatigue.

Subscribers who are tired of receiving your messages will either ignore them, delete them, or mark them as spam. All of these non-actions lead to a drop in open rate and are sure signs of email fatigue.

addressing the issue

If you suspect email fatigue is affecting your email marketing, it’s crucial to take remedial steps immediately before more damage ensues. First, pull back on the frequency of your email sending. Decrease the daily, weekly and monthly timing to give your subscribers a breather from your messages.

Next, analyze your segmentation. What are you doing now to send messages to specific segments, and how can you improve in this area? Segmentation allows you to send hyper-relevant content, so it’s a vital way to earn back the disengaged subscribers you’ve created.

Finally, spend more time ironing out the content of the email marketing you’ll be sending in the near future. How are you going to re-engage burned out subscribers with subject lines, branding, and content?

wake your subscribers up

Email marketing fatigue is bad for everyone – for your subscribers, your brand image, and your revenue. Over time you want subscriber engagement to increase, not decrease. But irrelevant content joined with over-sending is just what will cause that drop in engagement.

Don’t get caught up in the hype of sending more and more email. It may seem like it’s working in the short term, but in the long term, it will cause more harm than good. Avoid email fatigue and your email marketing program will slowly and steadily build engagement, earn trust with subscribers, and bring your brand the big bucks.

If you need help identifying or putting together a plan of attack for an email marketing fatigue issue, reach out to our experts. We’ve seen it all before and can help you get your email marketing program back on its feet again.

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