It is no secret that consumer emails have become a dominant form of marketing in today’s electronic age. Marketers enjoy the benefits of sending cost-effective, personalized messages in real-time to their prospects and subscribers, promoting their brand. In 2015, a reported 205 billion emails were sent and received per day (Radicati). Unfortunately, this staggering number of emails means full inboxes, and perhaps information overload. If you have seen a gradual decrease in engagement metrics – opens and clicks – your list might be suffering email fatigue.

Diagnosing the Problem

There are two main contributors to email fatigue – irrelevant content and communicating with your audience too often. Once a target opens multiple communications that do not pertain to them or their interests, they begin to ignore a company’s emails altogether and ultimately become disengaged. People change and situations change. What might have been relevant to a consumer at one time may no longer be of need. Emailing subscribers too frequently is also a major deterrent. If a customer feels like they receive multiple messages from the same company each time they check their inbox, they may feel overwhelmed and mark the messages as spam, or unsubscribe altogether.

The Remedy

Stay current

When drafting your emails, make it a priority to include fresh and engaging content to keep subscribers interested. You should also keep an eye on your competitors to see what messages and content they’re delivering to stay competitive. Finally, examine what people in your industry are talking, tweeting, and blogging about, so you can keep relevant in your messaging.

Continually segment your list

Get to know your subscribers! If you emails aren’t personalized and segmented by demographics, purchase habits or other behavior, you are greatly increasing your risk of an unsubscribe request. Test changes in email marketing strategy to see what generates the biggest response. By dividing subscribers into groups and sending each group a different email, you can examine the attitudes and likely outcome towards each possible option. It’s all about sending the right message to the right person, at the right time.

Realize when to disengage

Knowing when to let subscribers go is important. Monitor response and deploy a reengagement campaign to those who have not opened or clicked your emails for some time. If they still take no action, it may be time to remove them as a target. It is most effective to focus on leads and subscribers with an ongoing level of interest as opposed to continuing to throw resources at subscribers that will ultimately decrease engagement metrics.

Update permissions routinely

Building an interactive component into your emails prompts a response from the customer, actively engaging them to consent to your messaging. Subscribers can refresh their permission and preferences, so the marketing can be directly tailored to their needs.

Do you follow any of these tips to combat email fatigue? Mitigate unsubscribers by using a targeted list and tailored message to prospects and subscribers. Redi-Data can help turn the best data into better business with infinite list and data solutions.