Fashion retailers averaged about 31 emails a month, more than any other kind of shop, when the review site Email Tool Tester counted the newsletters sent by popular US online shops over seven months. That's roughly one a day. The busiest sent 640. I ignore every one that drops into my inbox. Not because I hate the brands. Because every one of them is the same message that went to everyone else on the list, and you can tell. It took me a while to work out what it reminded me of, and then it clicked: it's a school assembly (or the morning announcements, if you went to school in America).
I taught maths for seven years, and I sat through a lot of assemblies. Someone reads a PowerPoint out to two hundred students, everyone nods, and by lunchtime nobody could tell you what it was about. The conversation that actually changed something was always the two minutes with one student, about the one question they got wrong, in words that made sense to them. Most brand email is assembly. A very small amount of it is that two-minute conversation.
To be fair to the daily emailers, assembly does work, a bit. Researchers from NYU, Boston College and Columbia ran an experiment with a large North American online retailer and 603,153 of its customers. For a week, some got the usual daily coupon email and the rest got one every other day. The ones who heard less spent 7.6% less per day. If your job is this week's sales figure, daily email wins.
I think that's true. I also think it doesn't matter much. The same customers who got fewer emails were 59% less likely to unsubscribe, and the retailer's own records showed that people who unsubscribed went on to spend 36% less. So the extra emails win a little more this week, and lose customers for good. Google has started keeping score as well: since 2024, anyone sending large volumes to Gmail has to keep spam complaints below 0.3%, so the people you annoy now decide whether your emails arrive at all.
The bit that interested me as an engineer is what worked best. Switching everyone to every other day barely helped. Choosing how often to email each customer, based on how they'd behaved, did: in the researchers' model it raised lifetime value by up to 8.3% compared with daily emails to all. In other words, the answer wasn't a quieter assembly. It was more of the two-minute conversations.
Even the smallest step in that direction shows up in the numbers. In a field experiment published in 2018, researchers at Stanford and the University of Chicago found that just putting the recipient's name in the subject line raised opens by 20% and cut unsubscribes by 17%. That's the equivalent of a teacher learning your name, and it's hardly the height of personal attention (I know some teachers who'd still get it wrong in June).
A fashion brand can do a great deal better than a name. It already knows what each customer bought, what they kept and what they sent back. Someone who bought a winter coat in October doesn't need a month of winter coats; they might quite like to know what to wear with it. Someone who sends back everything in one particular cut is telling you something, loudly. The test I'd use is the one I used in the classroom: would I say this to this person, standing in front of them? If not, it probably shouldn't be in their inbox.
So my view is fewer emails, each one with a reason to exist for the person reading it. In a world of marketing written for everyone at once, that would be a genuine breath of fresh air. And nobody, in the history of schools, has ever walked out of an assembly wishing it had gone on longer.