Customers want brands they love to keep in touch with relevant outreach, but too many messages can erode customer loyalty.
While 81% of consumers want brands to which they consider themselves loyal to actively send relevant deals and reminders, just over half — 55% — say they have switched to a competitor because they’ve been bombarded with too many messages, according to an Optimove survey of more than 1,000 consumers shared with CX Dive. One-quarter say they have considered switching but haven’t yet.
“The question isn't how much brands should communicate; it's how relevant that communication is,” Rony Vexelman, VP of marketing at Optimove, said in an email. “Customers don't experience marketing fatigue from too many messages; they experience it from too many irrelevant ones.”
Brands might think that their marketing messages are maintaining brand relationships, but all too often they have the opposite effect.
Nearly 4 in 5 consumers say brands that send “fewer but more targeted messages” gain their loyalty faster, according to Optimove.
Such findings are in line with research from CSG. The customer experience and revenue management services company found that 83% of consumers say they could receive messages from a brand once a week without it being overwhelming, but that more than one-third of consumers will walk away from brands that contact them too often.
“When everything is ‘urgent,’ nothing is,” Katie Costanzo, president of CX at CSG, said in an email. “The new law of loyalty is that customers reward relevance, not repetition.”
It’s not that brands shouldn’t reach out to customers, but that they should contact them about what matters to them. CSG found that three in five consumers say exclusive deals would make them want to stay subscribed to a brand’s communications.
Leaders shouldn’t think of customer communication as only marketing, either, says Costanzo. A customer doesn’t view a brand as its individual departments, but as one entity.
“Brands that win loyalty are the ones using outreach to simplify customers’ lives,” Costanzo said. “That starts with a single, real‑time view of the customer so that everyone communicating with the customer — marketing, service, and billing — all work from the same picture. With that foundation, brands can optimize the single ‘next best’ message instead of having five systems talk at once.”
Overcommunication creates other risks, according to Costanzo. Customers may miss what matters, and they may stop trusting the brand.
A majority of consumers — 59% — have deleted important notices because they look like marketing, according to CSG.
“With a unified view of the customer, brands can understand when customers need another nudge or more support, and when an extra message would cause friction,” Costanzo said.
