The Inbound Growth Blog: Inbound Marketing, Sales and Service

Over Emailing: Don't Do It!

Written by David Ward | Jul 29, 2015

Step away from the keyboard! Over emailing your contact and customer lists is probably the biggest email marketing mistake you can make. Not only is it super annoying and likely to put-off customers, it can lead to serious un-subscribes – which mean lower ROI from each future email.

I get it, you need a quick win and it's tempting to send out an email blast to add a few thousand to your sales. However, if you're emailing your customers more then once or twice a month – DON'T DO IT!

Here's why over emailing is so bad:

  • Annoys Your Customers
  • Causes Recipients to Delete Before Even Opening
  • Or Worse, Causes Customers to Unsubscribe

What does unsubscribes do to your bottom line? Let's do some quick math:

Assume you have 35,000 subscribers in your list and on average you make $5,500 in revenue per email, which puts your revenue per subscriber at $0.15. If you get 150 unsubscribes per email when over emailing, you’re reducing your overall revenue per email by $22.50. This will slowly chisel away your subscriber base and revenue per email.

To make it worse, over emailing also leads to lower open rates, which means lower click-through, which all leads to lower revenue per email. You end up having multiple negative factors all working against you.

Finally, the data I've seen suggests that the subscriber loss per email goes up and up with each email, until you wake up one day to have 1000s of missing contacts.

So remember, shortcuts in life usually have negative consequences, and that applies to your email marketing strategy as well!