Marketers must understand audiences’ preferences to properly engage with them, but how do consumers currently feel about the current status quo?
To get the real story, DESelect gauged consumer sentiment with a survey asking the average buyer how they perceive marketing campaigns and what contributes to email overload.
A quick summation of our findings:
- Consumers enjoy emails with useful information about various promotions, discounts, and newly developed products.
- However, if the email frequency increases, customers feel overwhelmed and frustrated.
- These feelings lead to actions that harm brands’ relationships with these consumers.
These actions take many forms: unsubscribing from a mailing list, marking the emails as spam, or simply deleting them without reading them. To prevent these results, brands need to respect customers’ wishes and send valuable information.
Find all these insights and more in our consumer report: Understanding the Marketing Fatigue Tipping Point and How to Avoid
Consumers Have Limits
Emails are present worldwide. However, brands need to send relevant emails on particular days to not overwhelm customers.
Consumers mention they desire a maximum limit of 5 emails per week from individual brands. Evaluate whether your campaign cadences align with these expectations, or if there’s even room for further saturation.
If your current output exceeds this threshold, look for ways to optimize your campaign calendar. But, if the output is below this threshold, you still have space for sending additional valuable content.
12 percent of consumers experience email overload, a form of fatigue which reduces desire to engage with brands. Obviously, marketers have to reach consumers a certain amount to build relationships, but a disregard for their experience turns consumers off from engagement.
Speaking of value, 41 percent of customers say their biggest gripe with marketing emails is receiving irrelevant content. If you find a significant difference between the content you send and audience engagement, you need to determine whether your email segmentations, types, channels, offers, or messaging strategies need modification.
Data Privacy is a Big Issue
Consumers increasingly hate poor data handling and look for reliable security measures. As subscribing to emails requires sharing personal data, almost one-third have never purposely signed up for marketing emails. Amid increasing scrutiny, 85 percent of Americans believe their country’s data privacy laws need further regulations.
On the other hand, 30 percent think that it’s great when marketers use their shopping history in order to provide them with more relevant offers. Therefore, it would be good if your brand engages in transparent data acquisition practices that value consumer consent.
Overwhelmed Consumers Fight Back
Once consumers reach a feeling of apathy or anger from continued unnecessary emails, they tend to cut off any brand communication. They also started to ignore messages they didn’t find amusing or even sent those emails to the spam. Perhaps most concerning, 24 percent will stop shopping at a brand that annoys them and causes email overload.
These represent major threats to revenue, as disengaged subscribers will not engage with future sends and may even designate messages as spam, affecting deliverability across a brand’s entire campaign calendar.
Luckily, with DESelect Engage, brands utilize a command center that gives teams real-time insight into how, when, and where customers receive communications. This feedback helps marketers understand the right marketing mix and determine which campaigns need adjustments.
Key Takeaways
Consumers are very selective about email interaction. They want personalized and relevant content that will satisfy their needs but respect personal privacy.
If you have an unsuitable message frequency, you’ll cause huge damage to the customer relationship. Customers don’t prefer experiencing email overload.
To prevent email fatigue, Engage will help you monitor your audience saturation and ensure a top-notch email experience that fosters long-term relationships.
