How to piss off your customer in 13 emails (and counting)

We used to care more about oversaturating users with emails, but the introduction of the Gmail tab system for sorting out "Promos" was the watershed for a different approach (most other clients now have some sort of automated "clutter" folder for not-quite-spam).

Our user testing basically showed that users only bothered looking at one out of every dozen or so emails. But on the flipside, because users don't really care what ends up in a clutter folder, we don't get nearly as many unsubscribes either.

So unfortunately it kind of is what it is at the moment. There are increasingly diminishing returns in email budgets, so until companies abandon email as a channel altogether the pressure is on maintaining a constant presence in those clutter folders.