Money & Budget · 6 min read
More Emails Aren’t the Answer. The Right Ones Are.
Sending more emails doesn't fix a list that's gone quiet. Sending the right emails to the right people does.
Key Insights
- Increasing how many emails go out to the same list rarely increases revenue. It usually just increases unsubscribes.
- A large-scale analysis of segmented campaigns found meaningfully higher open and click rates than one-size-fits-all sends, with fewer unsubscribes, not more.
- Close to one in five people who unsubscribe from a brand’s email cite getting too many messages as the reason, and a similar share cite messages that weren’t relevant to them.
- Those two complaints, too many and not relevant, are usually the same problem described from two different angles.
- The fix isn’t a higher or lower send count. It’s fewer emails to people who don’t want that particular email, and more to the people who do.
What "The Right Ones" Actually Means
Sending more emails to a list that has gone quiet almost always makes the problem worse, not better. Every message that lands on someone who has already tuned out costs a little more attention than the last one, and eventually costs the subscriber entirely. The fix for a quiet list is rarely a bigger number. It’s making sure each message reaches the people it was actually written for, which is what email segmentation is built to do.
That distinction matters because “we’re not sending enough” and “we’re not sending the right things to the right people” get treated as the same problem, and they call for opposite responses.
Why "Send More" Feels Like the Obvious Move
The logic behind sending more is easy to follow. More emails means more chances to be seen, more chances to be clicked, more chances to convert. If eight emails a day produce some results, the thinking goes, twenty should produce more.
That logic holds only if every one of those emails is landing on someone who wants to hear from you about that specific thing. Most lists are not built that way. They’re one list, one send, one message, going to a mix of people at completely different stages of paying attention, interested in different parts of what’s on offer. Raising the volume on a list like that doesn’t reach more of the right people. It reaches the same people more often, whether or not the message was ever meant for them.
What Actually Happens When Volume Goes Up and Targeting Doesn't
The cost of that mismatch is not just a mildly annoyed subscriber. A large-scale analysis of email campaigns, comparing segmented sends against non-segmented sends from the same senders, found that segmented campaigns produced open rates roughly 14% higher and click rates roughly double those of one-size-fits-all sends. Unsubscribes ran about 9% lower on the segmented campaigns, and bounce and abuse-report rates were lower as well (Mailchimp, Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing Stats).
Run that finding in reverse and it explains what happens when a team raises volume without raising relevance. Every metric that improves with segmentation is a metric that tends to move the other direction when a list gets more email without getting better-matched email: fewer opens, fewer clicks, more people opting out for good. The list doesn’t get more engaged by hearing from you more often. It gets more tired.
Where the Unsubscribes Actually Come From
The two most common reasons people give for unsubscribing from a brand’s email sound like different complaints, but they usually point at the same root cause. Survey data on why consumers unsubscribe from marketing email found that close to one in five people cite getting too many messages, and a similar share cite messages that weren’t relevant to them (Mailgun, Inside the Mind of Consumers: Understanding Unsubscribes).
Those aren’t two separate problems that both happen to hurt a list. “Too many emails” is usually shorthand for “too many emails that weren’t for me.” A subscriber who gets exactly the update they signed up for, at a pace that matches how often that update is actually worth sending, rarely complains about volume. The complaint shows up when the volume and the relevance stop matching, in either direction.
What Segmentation Actually Looks Like in Practice
Segmentation doesn’t mean building twenty different email programs. It means grouping a list by something that actually predicts whether a given message is worth that person’s attention, and letting the cadence follow the group instead of applying one send frequency to everyone.
A few groupings tend to do most of the work: where someone is in their relationship with you (new subscriber, active customer, lapsed customer), what they’ve actually shown interest in (based on what they’ve clicked or bought before, not what you assume they’d like), and how engaged they’ve been recently (opening and clicking versus going quiet for months). A new subscriber who just signed up can usually handle more frequent contact while they’re paying attention. A customer who hasn’t opened an email in four months is being done no favors by getting the same twenty sends as your most engaged buyer.
The cadence question stops being “how many emails should we send” and becomes “how many emails should this group get, based on what they’ve already told us they want.” That’s a smaller, more answerable question, and it’s the one segmentation is actually built to solve.
A Simple Way to Start
None of this requires new software or a full rebuild of how email gets sent. Pull the last quarter of sends and sort the list by actual engagement: who opened and clicked consistently, who opened occasionally, and who hasn’t opened anything in months. That split alone usually reveals three groups with three very different appetites for more email.
From there, match cadence to appetite instead of applying one number across the board. The most engaged group can usually handle more frequent, more specific messages. The quiet group needs far fewer emails, aimed at winning back attention rather than adding to what already isn’t being read. Everyone in between gets something closer to the current pace, refined by what they’ve actually clicked on before. The list doesn’t need to grow to get more valuable. It needs to be read correctly first.
FAQ
What is email segmentation?
Email segmentation is the practice of dividing an email list into smaller groups based on something that predicts whether a given message is relevant to them, such as how engaged they’ve been, what they’ve shown interest in, or where they are in their relationship with your business. Instead of sending the same message at the same frequency to everyone on the list, each group gets messages and a cadence suited to where they actually are.
Why is segmentation important in email marketing?
Segmentation is important because relevance, not volume, is what determines whether an email gets opened, clicked, or ignored. Large-scale comparisons of segmented and non-segmented campaigns consistently show higher open and click rates alongside lower unsubscribe rates for segmented sends, because the message reaching each group is more likely to be one they actually want.
Related reading: the Blogs hub collects more pieces on where marketing effort and budget actually pay off, including a closer look at why a campaign problem is usually a blind spot instead, why a busy team isn’t always a burnt-out one, and what happens when that same list gets one email too many. For a longer conversation on this topic, see the KRTCL HIT podcast.