Posted by Chad S. White on September 11, 2025
Leave a Comment
For the nearly two decades I’ve been in the email marketing industry, everyone has always fretted about whether or not they’re sending too much email—and then they’ve gone ahead and sent more email.
A few years ago, I spoke to a reporter who was convinced that email frequency was absolutely out of control. I explained that inbox providers and subscribers are the ultimate arbiters of how much is too much.
Inbox providers start junking and blocking a sender’s emails if they see too low of a positive engagement rate from their users, such as opens, dwell time, forwards, and foldering—or too high of a negative engagement rate in the form of spam complaints. And subscribers opt out if they get too little value from a sender’s messages. Email frequency has a huge impact on both of those perceptions.
That’s still true today, but there are now other forces at work that seem to be finally slowing email frequency growth—and in some cases even reversing it. Here are the four major trends at work:
