Email is the dominant communication channel for many marketers.
Fifty-nine percent of respondents in The 2025 Optimove Insights Consumer Marketing Fatigue Report report said they prefer email as their primary marketing channel, surpassing social media (18%) by more than 3x.
The reason to focus on email is clear: When shopping online, nearly half (48%) of consumers notice email messages more often than those from other channels, and at nearly double the rate of social media ads.
Those figures are backed up by findings from Mailmodo:
59% of B2B marketers say that email is their preferred channel for revenue generation.
24% of marketers primarily use email marketing to get sales.
16% of marketers use email marketing to build customer relationships and evoke loyalty.
72% of marketers prefer to use emails to communicate with their prospects across different customer journey stages.
It’s a great marketing channel – if used in the right way. The problem is that a majority of marketers rely on brute force email marketing, using little, if any customer segmentation, and then overwhelming prospects and customers alike with emails, an email abuse that results in marketing fatigue.
Overusing email
Even though nearly half of consumers notice email messages more often than other types of ads, basing your marketing strategy solely on this statistic is a disservice to prospects and customers and likely will cause the business customers in the long run.
The Optimove report points out that more than 1-in-3 respondents (37%) find email to be most annoying channel when receiving a lot of marketing messages. Marketers should note that over-sent emails are not just annoying, they cost companies business.
More than half (57%) of respondents said they’ve switched to a competitor multiple times due to being bombarded by a brand’s emails.
And a majority of those customers who have been bombarded by emails are likely lost for good. Seven-in-10 consumers have unsubscribed from at least three brands in the last three months due to excessive messaging, and 36% unsubscribing from six or more brands.
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The key to fighting email abuse and customer fatigue is customer focus.
Ninety percent of customers want to be able to customize the frequency and types of messages that they receive. Nearly as many (84%) of loyal customers are more likely to repurchase after receiving email reminders or deals, up from the 60% of last year’s report.
Three quarters of respondents consider personalization important, up significantly from the 54% of the 2024 report. Just as importantly, 81% of respondents said they were more likely to open an email tailored to their interests, not just including their first name. Yet 60% of respondents report receiving emails from brands when they’re not relevant to real-time needs, objectives, readiness or preferences.
Timing is also important. Sixty percent of respondents report receiving poorly timed emails, which reduces their relevance as well as customer engagement. Nearly 8-in-10 (78%) want fewer, but more targeted, emails. It’s important to note that relevancy drives conversion. Two-thirds of respondents said they are more likely to purchase from brands that offer recommendations based on past purchases.
Avoiding Email Fatigue
Email will continue to be a vital channel for marketing engagement will into the foreseeable future. However, poor execution of email marketing risks customer disengagement as well as brand erosion. Using advanced technology, such as customer relations management (CRM)-integrated email platforms, marketers can easily craft hyper-personalized campaigns that drive loyalty, boost lifetime customer values, and build stronger customer relationships. Some best practices for optimizing email campaigns include:
Actively, automatically monitor engagement indicators: Use analytics to track opens, clicks and spam complaints.
Scale gradually: By incrementally adjusting email frequency, you can avoid ISP-spam flags.
Shift from transactional to relational email marketing campaigns. Rather than using the “spray and pray” approach, use dynamic email templates to use email with real-time content updates.
Automation technology can automatically trigger emails to be sent for certain milestones (e.g., loyalty anniversaries, replenishment reminders.
Align campaigns with customer needs by using multi-band management tools.
Technology Gives Rise to Positionless Marketing
Fighting the battle against email fatigue can’t be done by the CMO alone. The good news is that with today’s technology, which drives Positionless Marketing, the CMO isn’t fighting a lone battle. Positionless Marketing frees marketing teams from the limitations of fixed roles, giving every marketer the power to execute any marketing task instantly and independently. Its Positionless Marketing Platform provides three transformative powers: Data Power lets anyone immediately discover customer insights for precise targeting and hyper-personalization — without waiting for engineers. Creative Power lets anyone instantly create channel-ready assets like copy and visuals — without waiting for creatives. And Optimization Power lets anyone run campaigns that optimize themselves through automated journeys and testing — without waiting for analysts. By liberating marketing teams from dependencies, they are more motivated, get more done, and are able to deliver the most personalized campaigns at scale — achieving better marketing ROI.
Optimove is building a future where people can do anything and be everything in the world of marketing.
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