Email Fatigue
Welcome to ABC’s “Popular Topic” blog series, where we share our bite-sized, quickly consumable perspectives on trending or highly-discussed topics in the CX, digital platforms, and marketing world—breaking down the buzzword to its most foundational forms, and sharing how to apply it to your business. As simple as ABC.
Do you ever sit around wondering If your contacts are tired of hearing from you? Well, if you’re a marketer, you do.
In today’s world of “always on” nurture campaigns, it’s easier than ever for marketers to reach their contacts. Costs to the business have decreased thanks to the evolution of automation platforms. Instead of sending paper flyers, we now send hundreds of emails, text messages, or other (potentially bothersome) digital messages.
The outcome of these tactics is a highly responsive, real-time experience for customers. If they visit your website or reach out via a contact-us form, they can instantly receive a response—or your website could immediately update to show refreshed content based on their behavior.
Amazing, right? Well… yes and no.
What employing these tactics also means is the increased risk of overwhelming and fatiguing your customer, with too much, too irrelevant, or too invasive messaging from your company.
Ok. So what are some strategies you can implement in order to decrease this risk, and keep a happy (but well-informed) customer?
Consolidate Your CX Journeys.
You can do this by auditing your contact lists and working to ensure there is no duplicative efforts to market to them via similar messaging. Check for overlapping workstreams, and consolidate where possible. If there is one product with multiple journeys (“adopt” “expand” “renew”), could it be combined into one? (“full lifecycle”) Doing so may also improve your reporting strategy as the data being centralized into one campaign may make insights clearer.
Establish Platform Rules and Campaign Hierarchy.
If your company has multiple divisions sending email messages, you can implement “touch cadence” filters on the master rules applied to your contact lists—meaning, if a contact has already received X number of emails that week, they are automatically excluded from future emails for another X number of days. (this process may vary based on which marketing automation platform you’re using.)
For campaign hierarchy, work with your internal teams to determine priority. If a contact qualifies for more than one campaign: which campaign takes precedence, and which will either need to wait (for a specific period of time/days) OR be excluded entirely?
Apply Segmentation Strategies.
This exercise allows you to zero in on the audience for your communications. Note that it will most likely decrease your audience size, which can be preferred to ensure the messaging is targeted and yields the engagement metrics you need (by allowing you to determine the effectiveness of your content).
Listen to Your Audience.
Remember to regularly monitor your campaign performance reports, and continuously refine your segments (meaning, remove or add) as those existing contacts (and their behavior) indicate.
Overall, you should be making hypotheses before an email send (“if we add this filter to the email send list, then it should result in increased opens due to improved targeting for this audience”) and then tracking post-send if your findings positively correlate.
And that’s it! As easy as ABC. As always, reach out to us if you have any questions or help implementing these strategies at your company.