What is email fatigue?

Email fatigue happens when your subscribers start to feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive from you. As a result, they may become less likely to open and engage with your emails.

Email fatigue can lead to:

Lower engagement: Subscribers may ignore or delete your emails, which can decrease engagement.
More unsubscribes: Overwhelmed subscribers might opt out of receiving messages altogether.
A damaged sender reputation: When you send too many emails, subscribers might start marking them as spam, which can damage your sender reputation.
Lower deliverability rate: A damaged sender reputation can lead to increased spam filtering and reduced email delivery.

4 ways to minimize email marketing fatigue

1. Segment your lists

List segmentation separates your target audience into smaller, more specific groups based on various criteria. So instead of blasting your whole list with the same messages, you’ll be sending relevant messages to each group. This can go a long way toward preventing email fatigue because not everyone on your list will receive all the emails you send.

Common segmentation criteria for ecommerce brands include:

Demographic segmentation: Group your subscribers by characteristics like age or location.
Behavioral segmentation: Send messages based on people’s interactions with your website, emails, SMS texts, push notifications, etc.
Psychographic segmentation: Segment your subscribers based on their personal interests, values, etc.

2. Personalize your messages

Send personalized emails that go beyond simply including a first name in a message. For example, you can:

Recommend products based on past purchases or product page browsing behavior.
Send event invitations based on location.
Celebrate a subscriber’s birthday or anniversary with a special offer.

3. Experiment with frequency

Experiment to find the optimal frequency for your emails.

For example, monitor cart recovery and unsubscribe rates for two-email abandoned cart flows vs. three-email flows within a 72-hour period.

4. Maintain good email list hygiene

Here are some ways to keep your email list clean:

Prioritize engaged subscribers: Create engaged segments to send targeted emails to while deleting or suppressing unengaged segments.
Make it easy to unsubscribe: Give your subscribers a clear unsubscribe option to reduce spam complaints while keeping interested contacts.
Keep analyzing your email list: Regularly clean your list and think about which metrics you’re basing your decisions on—clicks to your website, on-site behavior, or recent orders, for example.

Ready to send engaging emails and keep unsubscribe rates low? Klaviyo can help you segment your audience, run A/B tests, and send personalized email marketing campaigns.