Are Marketing Emails Overwhelming Customers?

Is there a limit to how many marketing emails customers will put up with?

According to a new study, the answer is very much yes.

EMarketer shares the recently released results of a survey conducted by First Insight, which, in Nov. 2015, polled 1,112 Internet users in the United States regarding their perspectives on emails they receive from retailers. “Too many” appears to equate with five or more marketing emails per week, with two-thirds of the respondents to the First Insight survey categorizing that threshold as such.

And that’s only the high bar, with eMarketer sharing First Insight’s finding that, even among respondents that received fewer than five marketing emails per week, 21 percent regard that as unacceptably excessive.

Among the reasons for which retailers employ marketing emails, the outlet highlights reminding online shoppers that they left items in their cart without checking out, as well as efforts to increase subscription numbers.

Regarding the latter instance, the eMarketer story points to another survey — this one from Publicare Marketing Communications — that found that, among 6,109 U.S. retail websites that offer email subscriptions (analyzed in the period from April 2015 to June 2015), 87.3 percent of them attempt to compel shoppers to subscribe by means of a form on their homepage.

Perhaps that’s a more agreeable method, from the average consumer’s perspective, than marketing emails — whose frequency, if it becomes deemed “too much,” could result in “not enough” sales for the merchants behind them, as they could turn customers off from the retailer altogether.