What is List Fatigue?

List fatigue occurs when recipients tire of emails, affecting engagement and deliverability—recover with ReachMail!

What is list fatigue?

This happens to all lists as they get older. Your recipients get tired of receiving your email. This usually comes from sending emails too frequently or the content is irrelevant to the recipient. The needs of your contacts are constantly changing list fatigue happens when you don’t keep up with those needs. List fatigue can also present itself in abandoned mailboxes. Email marketers lose on average about 22.5% of their list every year due to data degradation. This could happen as people stop using an old email address and replace it with a newer one, or if they change companies and get a new email address.

How to identify list fatigue? 

This has become a challenge as privacy policy changes are growing. The beginning of this change has left us having to dig through our data and know the trends. List Fatigue is identified by low open rates, low click rates, and high unsubscribe rates. All of these are presented in your Reports with ReachMail. With the changes in privacy policies metrics from other channels can be useful too. If this customer is still purchasing or interacting with your brand in other ways, email just may not be the way to build a relationship with them. 

What effect does list fatigue have on my deliverability? 

List fatigue can harm your sender reputation. Your sender reputation is what can help or harm your inbox placement.  Continuously sending to disengaged subscribers is considered spam-like behavior. Performing spam-like behavior will harm your sender reputation. Review Reaching the Inbox best practices to learn more about sender reputation. List fatigue practices can appear to your recipient that you value sales more than a relationship with them. Developing that relationship with your recipient takes deliberate best practices. 

How to recover from list fatigue with ReachMail.

1. Deeper segmentation. The goal is to build a relationship with your recipient. Using the data your collect segment your list to send the most individualized email possible. The days of spray and pray, everybody gets the same thing, just send to everybody, etc are long gone. ReachMail has premade segments to use along with any custom segments you wish. Tags with ReachMail take a little more preparation, but can also be used to help segment your list to exactly the right audience for your message. 
2. Ask for Feedback. ReachMail Surveys allow you to customize a way to ask your customers for their opinion. They are the ones that engaged with your emails so getting quality feedback from them is essential to any successful marketing campaign, especially one that has hit list fatigue. Focus on building the relationship instead of selling your product. 
3. Find the right sending time. Use ReachMail’s Reporting to see who and when your emails are being opened. Also, use your external metrics. If you know your website has most of its traffic for the day between 3 and 4 pm. Send your message at 3:21 pm to catch your audience. Sending your message directly on the hour or half-hour is not recommended. 
4. Find the right frequency. ReachMail has preference centers to get enable your subscribers to select what emails they wish to receive. How often do they wish to receive an email? Also, consider putting a pause option in your preference center.
5. Know when it's time to say Goodbye. This can help your list fatigue and your sender reputation in one process. Using our List Maintenance tool you can review your engagement and remove those disengaged recipients to bring your list new life.