Picture the meeting. You're sending twelve emails a week to your customer base. It feels like too many. The team agrees. So you do the sensible, responsible thing and cut it to four.
I've watched a version of this play out first-hand, and the lesson stuck. The mistake wasn't the decision to send fewer emails. It was making that decision blind, without knowing who was actually reading them.
A single send list is never a single audience.
Some of those emails were landing with people in-market right now: browsing, comparing, close to buying. For them, frequency wasn't noise, it was fuel. Cut their supply and you don't reduce annoyance, you starve conversions that were about to happen.
Others were landing with people who hadn't opened a message in three months. For them, frequency wasn't fuel, it was furniture. They'd stopped noticing it long ago. Sending them less changed nothing, because they were already gone.
So a blunt cut hit the wrong group. It throttled the engaged to spare the indifferent, and the £35,000 was the gap between those two mistakes.
This is the discipline most teams skip. They grab the lever, frequency, subject lines, send times, without first understanding the machine it's attached to. When the machine breaks, they blame the lever, reverse the change, and learn nothing.
The uncomfortable truth is that most marketing decisions fail not because the idea was wrong, but because it was applied to everyone at once. Every optimisation rests on knowing your audience first. Build that foundation, then pull the levers with confidence. Skip it, and you're not optimising, you're guessing with a bigger budget.
So before the next "let's send less" decision, the question that matters isn't how many. It's less to whom. Answer that honestly and the £35,000 stays in the business.
