11 steps to stop subscriber fatigue before it starts

Last updated: October 28, 2024

Newsletters have become one of the most important revenue drivers for media companies. But with more money has come more competition — and more competition for your audience’s attention.

That’s making readers more selective, and they’re unsubscribing from excess content in favor of higher-quality, value-driven newsletters. So going into 2025, how can you cut through the noise and keep your audience engaged?

11 steps to stop subscriber fatigue before it starts

Understand what causes subscriber fatigue

A quick pulse check before we get started: None of the tactics we discuss below will work for you if you don’t identify and address the reasons your audiences might lose interest. So below we’ve listed the top reasons why audiences experience email fatigue. Keep these in mind as you plan your engagement strategy:

Stay ahead and read our Q3 2024 email engagement report to uncover trends & best practices for success:

Too many emails: Flooding inboxes leads to fatigue, fast.
Irrelevant content: If the topics don’t match their interests, people lose interest.
Overly promotional: Constant sales pitches can feel spammy and annoying.
Poor email design: Clunky or hard-to-read emails drive people away.
Lack of personalization: Generic content feels disconnected and impersonal.
Inconsistent sending: Sporadic or unpredictable emails confuse readers and cause subscriber fatigue.
No clear value: If subscribers don’t see a benefit, they won’t stick around.
Difficult to unsubscribe: Frustration with a hard-to-find unsubscribe button can lead to subscriber fatigue permanent disengagement.

Perfect your fundamentals

In the panic to prevent subscriber fatigue, it’s tempting (and frankly, more fun) to over-index on big swings — like redesigning the newsletter or chasing cross-promotions. But in many cases, they’d get better results by reprioritizing and perfecting their fundamentals — like their deliverability, list health, audience-first content, etc.

So before implementing major changes, review your performance and ensure you follow email best practices. Some quick fixes include:

Resolve deliverability issues right away: Are your deliverability rates below 95%? If yes, you’re probably getting sent to your audience’s spam folders. So don’t press go. Don’t collect $200. Go directly to your email service provider to see how you can improve your sending reputation and inbox placement. To prevent deliverability issues, clean your list at least quarterly, if not monthly, and follow these best practices.

(Note: Some email providers like Omeda provide built-in deliverability monitoring and support so you can a) prevent most deliverability issues before they arise and b) resolve any issues that may arise).

Audit your content to prevent subscriber fatigue. Take a look at the articles you’re linking to within emails. Are certain topics beginning to underperform? (To make this easier, tag each of your articles by topic, knowledge level, etc., so you can run a query on performance for each tag.)

Review your email engagement data to identify your audience’s best send times and dates. As audience preferences shift, your sending cadence needs to shift, too. If your performance is dropping off, retest different send times and days.

Check in on your automations, like your welcome or re-engagement campaigns. Since these run more frequently than any single newsletter or promotional email, underperformance here will outsize your deliverability and overall email health.

Review your automation performance, paying close attention to audience drop-off throughout the campaign lifecycle. Some other questions to ask:

Do your open and click rates fall off a cliff halfway through the series? If so, consider shortening your series.

Do certain articles within your welcome series get more clicks than others? Review link performance within individual emails of your campaign, then swap out underperforming articles — or use dynamic content blocks to surface personalized recommendations for each recipient.

Do you have a process for removing subscribers from campaigns once they meet the designated goal, or do they show signs of email fatigue? If not, you risk alienating your subscribers and hurting your deliverability.

Are there any opportunities to personalize content within these campaigns?

Reduce friction by balancing external links with zero-click newsletter content

Most newsletters list a series of articles/resources, and then link out to the website or external sources. This makes sense in theory: You can distribute content you’ve already created while driving traffic back to your site and getting click data to inform your strategy.

But that adds friction to the user experience. If taken too far, it keeps your audience from getting anything out of your newsletter.

For instance: Imagine a standard newsletter with six blocks that link to other articles. To get any value from that issue, readers need to click several links, read the linked article in a new tab, navigate back to the newsletter to keep reading, and then do it again… and again. That’s not a sustainable model, especially if most of your audience reads on mobile.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t link to anything else within your newsletter. Instead, balance external links with zero-click content, information that exists on its own within the newsletter.

For example, Send it Right, an email deliverability newsletter by Lauren Meyer, includes articles right within the newsletter. Subscribers benefit by getting everything they’re promised without navigating elsewhere. That doesn’t just maximize engagement, it also lets Meyer position the newsletter as an important information source in its own right, not just a promotional channel for her website. That’s the key to keeping people engaged.

The Morning Shakeout, a running newsletter by Mario Fraioli, still does the link roundups you’ll see in other newsletters. But Fraioli adds significant clarity and context to each story he mentions, so the readers get a general idea of a) what it is and b) why it matters, even if they don’t click out to read more.

Allowing people to read some, if not most, of your newsletter within the message itself keeps your audience engaged and lowers the chance that they’ll get distracted by other apps/messages on their phones.

Conduct deep dives on specific topics through newsletter courses or special interest editions

Say you’ve got a meaty new topic to cover, like an election, the Olympics, etc. Maybe you’ve done extensive reporting, you’ve got a lot of data to share, or it’s just an incredibly broad topic.

If you shove it all in your newsletter, you risk turning away audience members who are only kind of interested in the topic. (“Ugh, this is their 4th straight newsletter about first-party data. Goodbye!”)

But if you’ve done your research, part of your audience will find it valuable – and could even pay for it. (“X Newsletter is giving me the tools I need to get buy-in for a first-party data strategy at my company! This is going to get me a raise!”)

So how can you provide deeper expertise without exhausting the rest of your audience? Consider sharing the knowledge through a separate newsletter course or special edition newsletter.

Some examples we love: The Fix, a media industry newsletter, recently released a free newsletter-based course about how to build an audience. All of the major news outlets created special temporary newsletters solely for the Olympics. And now those same outlets are creating specific newsletters for their US election coverage.

This has a few unique advantages: Besides attracting new audiences, organizing your course around a specific time-bound topic attracts a self-selecting, interested audience with very clear needs (so it’s easier to market to them).

Once this audience starts engaging with your course emails, you can encourage them to keep engaging once the newsletter ends (either by using content recommendations or dynamic content or offering subscription discounts in exchange for subscribing to your general newsletter, etc.)

The individual click data for each email, and each article within the email, will help you identify your audience’s specific skill levels, knowledge gaps, and interests. And that’ll help you make your content even more relevant moving forward.

We’ve also seen media organizations like Financial Times use special edition newsletters to drive website registrations and event signups, rather than the other way around. This is another great way to expand your total addressable market without exhausting the rest of your base.

Turn readers into collaborators with user-generated content

The best newsletters aren’t just broadcast channels. To varying degrees, they create a two-way exchange between creator and audience members. How this looks will depend on your business model and your audience dynamics.

But the rule of thumb: The more involved your audience feels, the more likely they will choose you over the other newsletters in their inbox. So get your audience involved in your newsletter with these tactics:

Ask audience members to submit questions for future content, like podcast episodes or “ask me anything”-style Q&As that you host within the newsletter. Giving your audience a chance to get their questions answered is the best way to ensure they’re getting value from your content.

And, as a bonus, giving them something to look forward to in the coming weeks. Ann Helen Peterson recently included a great example in her Culture Study newsletter:

Feature testimonials, reviews, or social media highlights to create a sense of community and increase relevance.

Shout out a subscriber at the beginning of a newsletter or include a comment/positive review.

Reward your audience for referring a friend by shouting them out in your newsletter, offering discounts or free access to paid products, or sending them free merch.

Run a poll about your topic, including both multiple-choice and open-ended answers. Run the best responses in the newsletter alongside your own commentary.

Offer more flexible subscription options to combat subscriber fatigue

Inbox service providers (ISPs) use a lot of different factors to decide whether to send your email to recipients’ primary or spam folders. Their formulas are famously opaque, but one factor is (mostly) under your control: engagement.

ISPs use your newsletter’s open and click rates and your audience’s clicking and scrolling behaviors to judge whether your audience thinks your emails are legitimate and helpful. So from a deliverability perspective, you’d rather have someone receive your emails only once per week, but click every time, than have someone receive your emails every day but only click through 20% of the time.

People often unsubscribe from emails when they think they’re getting too many irrelevant emails. But if they can receive fewer but more relevant messages, they’re more likely to stay subscribed and keep engaging.

So, on your preference pages, give your audience more ways to control their sending frequency. For example, they could swap out an email for another piece of content, like a podcast episode or a case study.

Use multi-dimensional segments to create more thoughtful subscriber experiences

The best newsletters don’t just segment by behavior and purchase history. They’re using specific segments — like location, engagement level, interest, etc. — to create more relevant, effective customer journeys for every audience member. Here’s how to do it:

Localize your offerings: More publishers and newsletter operators are using in-person events to create community among their audience members and bring their offerings to life. Segmenting by location will make it easier to plan and promote these events. So ask your audience for their location in your sign-up flow. Then, identify readers in a particular city to inform them about an in-person event you’re running near them.

Create a more curated welcome series: Many newsletters will welcome new subscribers with a series of 3-5 emails, which introduce the reader to the whole slate of their brand’s content. But if you’re running a general focus newsletter, these campaigns risk being too broad or too self-promotional.

Instead, consider creating multiple welcome series corresponding to common interests or preferred content formats. For example, say you run a newsletter covering media industry news, focusing specifically on building sustainable media businesses and broad industry coverage.

In this case, you’d create two welcome series—one featuring case studies and webinars from leading media businesses and another featuring original reporting on the media industry as a whole. This would give everyone in your audience the content that’ll keep them engaged long after the first email.

How to do it: Ask audience members to check off their preferences on your sign-up form. For best results, use a form builder that connects directly to your database, so that each person’s preferences are automatically added to their audience profile, and they’re placed in a segment corresponding to those preferences (following the example above, someone interested in media industry coverage would be added to a “news” segment). Then create two welcome series featuring relevant content for each of these segments.

Reward your most loyal subscribers: Query your audience for your most engaged subscribers, whether that’s by open and click rate, the length of time they’ve been subscribed, the number of times they reply to your newsletter, etc. Send premium content — like podcast episodes or reports — early. Or you could even create specific assets just for this audience. For best results, surprise your VIPs with these extras about once a quarter.

Personalize emails based on the subscriber’s lifecycle stage — whether they’re new, active, or long-time readers: Tailoring content to where they are in their journey ensures relevance and reduces fatigue.

Use content recommendations to personalize at scale and prevent subscriber fatigue

Segmentation still has its limits, though. No matter how many filters you mix and match, segments still can’t fully personalize to the individual. (The most famous example: King Charles and Ozzie Osbourne, both globally renowned Brits born in 1948, but imagine addressing the King of England the way you would the lead singer from Black Sabbath).

But to prevent subscriber fatigue, you need to be that precise. That’s where dynamic content comes in: Each recipient gets email content based on their unique engagement and purchase history.

For best results, use content recommendations in your re-engagement emails. That way, every subscriber gets exactly the message they need to reconvert. That’s what Endeavor Business Media did in 2024, and it’s helped them reactivate more than 150,000 subscribers and counting. (See how they did it here!)

Capture richer audience feedback by using expanded survey formats

Surveys give you audience feedback straight from the source, so they’re one of the most cost-effective ways to drive first-party data and prevent subscriber fatigue.

But they’re not perfect: Time-consuming year-end surveys are naturally vulnerable to self-selection bias — your most highly engaged audience members are most likely to open and respond, which skews your data and keeps you from getting important critical feedback.

They’re also subject to survivor bias — you’re not going to hear from that person who unsubscribed 8 months ago.

Conducting surveys once or twice per year also means you’re missing a lot of insights: Almost nobody will remember your newsletter from seven months ago, even if they liked it enough to share with a friend.

So, in addition to year-end surveys, include mini-surveys in all your emails to get a more consistent flow of first-party data and feedback. Here are a few ways to do it:

Incorporate flash surveys within individual content blocks to see how your audience responds to individual topics: You can use the click data for individual articles to approximate your audience’s level of interest in particular topics. “70% of the audience clicked on our article about election security, so 70% of our audience must be interested in election security,” as the logic goes.

But clicks aren’t perfect indicators of someone’s interest: Maybe everyone clicked that article because it was listed at the top of the newsletter instead of at the bottom. Or because your star reporter wrote the piece, you had a good headline, etc.

More importantly, the number of clicks doesn’t necessarily tell you why someone clicked or how they feel about the topic, both of which are essential to creating a well-rounded content strategy.

The solution: Include one-question surveys within individual content blocks to gauge audience sentiment about individual topics. For instance, The DONUT, a nonpartisan news newsletter for the Gen Z set, ended its section on election integrity with a one-question poll asking viewers how confident they were in American election security.

Clicking a response led to a Google form, where audience members can add an open-ended response that might appear in a future newsletter. This doesn’t just make it easier for readers to provide feedback. It tells the DONUT team how they feel, something they’d never be able to fully capture through pure behavioral data.

Bonus: You can also use the responses to lend additional context and spark conversations in subsequent issues as The DONUT does below:

Include one-question surveys at the end of each newsletter: To capture and synthesize feedback in real time, include mini-surveys at the end of individual newsletters. This can consist of a single general satisfaction question, like Every includes at the bottom of its issues.

The one-click format makes it easier for any reader to respond, so you’re not as dependent on die-hard audience members taking the time to respond to your year-end surveys.

Regularly including surveys also gives you a more consistent, granular flow of information. You can see how individual topics resonate with your audience and stop unsubscribing before they start.

Create more responsive automations and combat subscriber fatigue with campaign planning tools and fatigue filters.

The #1 reason people experience subscriber fatigue? Getting too many emails that don’t feel relevant. But sometimes, your audience doesn’t want to completely unsubscribe. They just need a break for a few days or weeks.

That’s where campaign planning tools like fatigue filters can help you prevent churn. Here’s how they work:

Say you’re running a weekly 4-email welcome series for your new subscribers, but Bill is already subscribed to two of your weekly newsletters.

You need Bill to have all the necessary onboarding information for newsletter #2, but you don’t want to overwhelm him, either. In this case, you might use a fatigue filter to temporarily stop sending one of your other newsletters to Bill until the welcome series ends.

Omeda makes this kind of responsiveness easy: On Omeda, you can use the fatigue filter to pause sending to recipients who have already received a certain number of emails from you within a specific time period (for example, anyone who received 3 emails in the last week will not receive the next email in the series until next week).

This way, you can space out your communications according to each individual’s needs without manually configuring the sending cadence.

Complement email with other marketing channels

Spreading your marketing message over multiple channels increases the odds that you’ll reach and convert them in any one place.

So if your email performance has plateaued, and you’re following the best sending practices mentioned above, consider replacing some of your emails with other types of messages, like SMS messages, website personalizations, retargeting, and more.

Maybe you’re running a 4-email renewal campaign. You might send one of those messages via SMS rather than email. (Pst: We just launched the ability to add SMS to workflows on Omeda. Learn more media-specific use cases for SMS marketing here.) Or you could use a website personalization to guide visitors toward a renewal. Or you could send four emails, but send direct mail to grab your audience’s attention to catch your audience in a new place.

This strategy has its limits: If you’re running newsletter ads, you might be unable to sacrifice the impressions you’d lose from switching to SMS. But experimenting with new channels gives you new ways to grow, engage and activate your audience — and you could be surprised by what you find!

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