Can You Send Too Many Marketing Emails?

Christmas, Black Friday, Holiday Season and EOFY are the busiest time for customers inbox. But does this mean you should sit by and watch as your competitors send thousands of emails to your customers?

In this article we'll stay away from delving too much into Email Copy and focus around data that we found and what this means about sending too many emails?

Before we begin I want to offer an explanation as to why we're discussing this in the first place. When I started my first online business I was told by some of my peers that they choose not to send marketing emails during peak periods as they felt they got lost amongst everyone else. While I'm sure there is some truth to this I couldn't help but feel that this was a bit of a cop-out or an excuse.

Years later and we launched one of our most aggressive 2025 Black Friday, Christmas & End of year EDM campaigns. We had a 29% in increased orders, thousands of dollars worth of sales and most surprising we managed to decrease our email un-subscription rate by 51% compared to the previous period.

One of the biggest factors that changed our approach was our strategy, I'll be the first to admit that I seriously underestimated how powerful email marketing was. If you're anything like me you're self taught, the only emails you wrote were to colleagues and official stuff. After your first year of sending out marketing emails you weren't noticing a huge response back so you gave up... sound about right so far?

So what changed? What did we do differently and how can you take this info into consideration when writing your next marketing email?

Increasing Customer Segments

Breaking down your customers into segments is so important, in fact it's one of the best strategies used in email marketing. I like to use the restaurant analogy, imagine you're trying to sell pizza to a room of 200 people. Out of the 200 people some are going to have dietary requirements, some will prefer pineapple and some people are only interested in the breadsticks your restaurant sells.

Most businesses will have the one size fits all approach, show your best sellers and you'll probably be able to convert maybe 80 of the 200 people to buy a pizza. With Email Marketing we can break down this 200 people and put them into seperate, 'relevant' customer segments. This means that you have all of the vegans in one room, all of the people who have purchased margaritas in another room and all of the meat-topped pizzas in a seperate room, you get the idea.

After breaking down your customers into theses seperate segments you don't just send out 1 general email to everyone but instead you're able to target and provide valuable info to that group.

After all you never really know if this work and most of the times we're making assumptions like 'If a customer has purchased a Margherita pizza before than maybe they will be interested in doing so again', or the generalisation that a 'vegetarian customer will never be interested in buying a meat lovers pizza'.

1,000 to 1 EDM Strategy

This is where the 1,000 to 1 EDM Email Strategy comes into place.

Instead of sending out 1,000 emails hoping to reach the 1 customer who is interested you break down the customers segments into more and more specific customer segments until you send 1 email to the 1 customer who is interested.

If you're reading this so far and your mind isn't blown thats great! these are the basics to email marketing and I'm glad you've already learnt this. the next section is for you ;)

EDM Marketing Basics

EDM Marketing means Electronic Direct Mail and is often broken down into an email campaign, the email itself, the strategy behind the campaign and all the other nitty gritty such as the copy used in your subject line, how long your email is, how many images you have in your email etc.

The Psychology of Email Fatigue

One of the most surprising things we discovered in our Black Friday - Christmas & End of Year Campaign was that even though we sent more emails than ever before, our unsubscribe rate dropped by 51%. This just goes to show that email fatigue and email unsubscribed rate isn't tied to the volume of emails being sent out but by how relevant your emails are.

That being said the better way to think about email fatigue is: Send more, but don't fall short on relevance!

Email Mindset Shift

Things not to think of:

• How many emails is too many?

• Am I bothering people?

• Will this annoy them?

Customers don't think in frequency, they think in value. If your sending out 1x Email every 2 days, by the time they see your email there've also received 10-50 emails from other companies that act as a buffer.

When is it too much?

At most we sent out 5 emails per week during our busiest period, this translates to around the average customer getting about 2-3 emails in that week. This is due to the customer being included in multiple customer segments.

What Absolutely Not To Do!

• Don't send irrelevant emails, this makes people annoyed.

• Don't send too many generic emails, this results in an increase unsubscribe rate.

• Double check you email before you send it, mistakes, wrong names / prices can lead to annoyed and disgruntled customers. (It's hard work getting a customer to click on a sale image let alone go ahead with the purchase but if it's a mismatching price then the customer feels like you've waisted their time).

When Un-subscription can be a Good Sign

When customers unsubscribe you might get scared or feel like you're doing something wrong but that alone is not enough context. If you're loosing email subscribers it's important to remember that this is just one metric and you have to take into account for what else is going on in your business. If you're adding new stock of one product that appeals to a new customer segment then you're probably becoming less relevant to your existing / previous customer segments.

This in itself isn't a bad thing, instead it shows that you're moving toward a direction and this shift is following through down into your customers.

The other reason how a lower email subscriber list is better than a bigger one is relevance and the audience, I'd choose a list of 5,000 subscribers that actively engage, find value and reply to my emails rather than a list of 50,000 subscribers who don't engage. Larger lists cost more to send emails to and there's really no point if no one is engaging with your content.

Now if you're reading this and thinking to yourself 'this is feeling a little loose' you're absolutely right, without directly asking your customer "why did they unsubscribe" then you're just speculating. There's nothing wrong with speculation and 9 times out of 10 you're probably correct, but acknowledging that this is speculation is super important.

This leads us nicely to our next section:

Data Is Power

The more data you have, the less speculation and the better your emails will get. There are so many tools available inside your  mail hosting provider or independently. Platforms like Shopify, Klaviyo and Mailchimp can show you open rates, click behaviour, purchase attribution, customer segments, and revenue generated per campaign.

Over time, this data allows you to stop guessing and start making informed decisions. You can see what subject lines work, what send times convert best, which products resonate with which audiences, and where customers drop off in the buying journey.

Remember, your goal isn't to send as many emails as possible, it's to send emails that hit!

Sending more emails can improve deliverability, if the emails are good.

This is an advanced concept that most marketers don’t realise until they’ve run high-volume, segmented campaigns.

But now you know!

The Raw Data:

Taken from Basic Barista, our coffee equipment online retail business.

Period: 1st Nov 2025 - 17th Dec 2025

Compared to: 1st Nov 2024 - 17th Dec 2024

• Orders increased 29% (compared to last period).

• Web Traffic increased 87% (compared to last period).

• Traffic from Email Marketing increased 22% (compared to last period).

• Orders attributed to Email Marketing increased 29% (compared to last period).

• Email Un-subscription rate decreased from 51% compared to last period.(Insane right!)

• Email Subscribers for the period increased 58% compared to the last period.