Run SMS, in-app messages, and email together and sooner or later a customer gets the same news three times in one day. Before adding channels, decide each channel’s role and a ceiling on send frequency.
Divide the roles by channel
Matching the message to each channel’s nature cuts duplication.
Before adding a channel, look back at how the ones you use are performing. In-app messages are seen quickly but only by people who open the app, SMS reaches nearly everyone but costs more, and email is cheap but delivery is less certain. Put each channel’s cost and response in one table and it becomes clear where to put your effort.
- In-app messages: informational notices such as orders, payments, and bookings
- SMS: urgent or time-critical alerts
- Email: long, in-depth content and newsletters
- Push notifications: light prompts that drive in-product actions
Set a frequency ceiling
Set a “frequency cap,” a limit on the total number of messages one customer can receive in a given period. For example, limit promotional messages to two per week across all channels combined. When the cap is reached, skip the lowest-priority messages first.
When designing messages that cross channels, you need a rule against sending the same news repeatedly. Set the order for moving to the next channel based on whether the message was seen, so that a customer who already saw the in-app message doesn’t get the same content by SMS; this greatly reduces fatigue.
What customers receive isn’t messages; it’s an impression of how much our brand respects their time.
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Write the priority rules down
Put rules such as transactional notices before promotions, and personalized messages before bulk sends, in a document the team reads together. For marketing messages, always check regulations such as consent requirements and quiet-hour restrictions.
Include send time windows in your rules. If you fit customers’ daily rhythm, in-app messages during working hours and long emails after lunch or in the evening, the same content is read with much less friction. Late-night sends can also be legally restricted, so be sure to check.
Choose the next message based on customer behavior
Pre-scheduled sends have limits. If you send the same message to every customer on the same day, customers who have already acted get the prompt too. When you decide the next message based on what a customer actually did, such as signing up, adding to cart, or paying, unnecessary sends fall away naturally.
For example, for a customer who has completed payment, stop discount messages for the same product and move on to a message explaining how to use it. Even a few of these switching rules often make a noticeable difference in how fatigued customers feel. Start with the two or three flows you use most.
- Remove customers who have already acted from that prompt’s audience right away
- For customers who don’t respond, don’t repeat the same channel; try a different channel just once
- Regularly prune long-unresponsive customers from your send lists
Consent and the unsubscribe experience are part of the design
Consent isn’t a procedure that’s over once you have it. When customers can choose which kinds of news they get and how often, more of them choose to adjust rather than unsubscribe. It’s a far gentler experience than having only two options: stop everything or receive everything.
Make unsubscribing easy and fast. If it’s a hassle, customers are likely to take stronger measures, like reporting your messages as spam or blocking notifications. Asking one light question about why they left also helps you learn which messages felt like a burden.
When you introduce a new rule, don’t apply it to all customers at once; test it on a subset first. Run a group with reduced frequency alongside a group at the old frequency for a few weeks and compare unsubscribe rate and purchase response, and you can confirm whether cutting back actually helped. Even if the result differs from what you expected, it’s valuable information about your customers’ tendencies.
Above all, it’s important that whoever handles sending doesn’t only look at their own messages but regularly looks directly at the customer’s inbox. Lay out the messages one customer received in a week in time order, and where they overlap and where it’s too much stands out before any number does.
When choosing a sending tool, check whether it can keep these rules too. Whether you can see each customer’s send history across channels, and set frequency caps and exclusion conditions, makes a big difference to how much work operations take. If the features fall short, it’s safest to at least keep each customer’s send history in a spreadsheet.
Finally, before sending, double-check that marketing messages clearly show sender information and how to opt out. Following the rules is also basic courtesy toward customers. Turning recurring checks into a pre-send checklist reduces mistakes.
Summary
Check unsubscribe rate and notification block rate by channel every month. These two numbers reveal fatigue faster than open rate. When you see signs of fatigue, reduce frequency before adding channels.
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