List Fatigue: Real World Example

The Situation
A client of mine is a franchisee of a national restaurant chain. This company was forced to send marketing emails designed by the corporate headquarters - much to their dismay.

These emails designed and thought up by the national headquarters were highly sales and marketing focused and provided little value to the subscriber. Headquarters' opinion was that the customer gave an email address, giving them a license to send this type of email. My client was correct when he mentioned that to him they seemed like spam - not relevant, highly impersonal, and the worst part, sent too often.

The Result
Over the initial 9 month period of sending these emails, the open rate declined from 60% to less than 35%. My friend wondered if maybe the problem was caused by their email service provider. It wasn't.

How did we know? After his open rate decreased, he began sending a birthday email to this same list. The open rate of that email was consistently above 55% - proving that the lack of opens for the other emails was not caused by technology, but because the subscribers had learned to ignore their spam-like marketing emails.

Effects of List Fatigue
Bad marketing behavior had fatigued their list. What was once an active list of roughly 13,000 subscribers became an active list of 9,000.

A net loss of 4,000 subscribers, even though they added several thousand subscribers during that time! Ouch!

Treat them well
Don't spam them. Sell them what they want. To do that, ask your subscribers questions. Survey them. Use data to keep your emails relevant. The more you know about your subscribers, the more relevant your emails can be written - and the less list fatigue you'll experience.