When engagement drops, or when peak season hits and revenue targets loom, marketing teams usually default to one of two extreme reflexes. Briefly ignore pressure caps and send more emails to make revenue targets, or send fewer emails to reduce marketing pressure.
Both of those decisions will hurt revenue. Send more without discrimination, and you train customers (and inbox providers) to ignore you. Send less to manage dropping engagement, and you’ll fall out of touch with your best customers.
Marketing pressure isn’t a question of more or less. It’s a question of relevance and orchestration and making sure each message has its place in the journey.
Why “more” or “less” isn’t the answer
When “sending more” fails, it’s usually not because your audience can’t handle the emails you’re sending. It’s because volume becomes undifferentiated: more promos, more newsletters, more blasts to bigger and colder segments when you need revenue.
From a business perspective, the thought process sounds rational: “We have a big database, activate everyone. Email doesn’t cost a thing.”
"The biggest mistake CRM leaders make is thinking email is free," explains Maëlys Pellat Bravo, CRM Lead at Brevo. "If you blast unengaged users just to hit a Q4 revenue target, you destroy your sender reputation. This means your highly engaged VIPs stop seeing your emails because they’re sitting in the spam folder. Recovering from that takes months."
If you don’t treat email like an investment, it’s never going to be profitable.
But sending less, which is the common overcorrection when teams see fatigue, isn’t the answer either. Intentionally cutting off communication with your best customers or high-potential contacts is also a mistake.
For engaged contacts, the strategy shouldn’t be to send less. It’s to send more but personalized. You don't need to reduce volume for your best buyers if every email feels like a 1:1 curation rather than a mass broadcast.
Here is how top-performing Mid-Market brands actually design their marketing pressure
If “more” and “less” aren’t the answer, what is? A strategy that starts with who you should target, and continues with what they should receive.
1. Stop targeting by list size; start targeting by recency and intent
Relevance starts with deciding who is actually eligible to receive pressure right now.
Recency-based targeting is the simplest, most reliable starting point: treat customers who were active recently differently from those who are cooling off, and very differently from those who haven’t engaged in months.
"This is your ultimate risk management tool," says Maëlys. "In peak periods, expanding your reach into cold cohorts is exactly how you harm the inbox placement of your engaged cohorts."
If your goal is to win back unengaged contacts, do it intentionally: segment by recency, tailor the message to the reason they’re inactive (not just “here’s a discount”), and do it gradually, only continuing the outreach if they engage with the previous email.
2. Capture interests early
From signup, your job is to learn what value means for this person. This might consist of onboarding questions, a preference center, or progressive profiling.
"Don't wait for behavioral data to tell you everything," advises Maëlys. "Use onboarding to explicitly ask for preferences. If you capture intent early, you never have to resort to the 'batch and blast' guesswork that drives unsubscribes."
Using an onboarding email flow that adapts based on first-browse or first-purchase signals is a great way to gauge interest early on. This helps you segment from the beginning and guide each contact to the right journey without wasting their time.
3. Personalize the email itself
Segmentation decides who receives a message. Personalization decides whether that message is going to get an unsubscribe or continue a relationship.
"Segmentation gets you into the inbox, but personalization keeps you there," Maëlys explains. "We've moved past basic name tags. Mid-market brands need to use modular content blocks so the exact same campaign feels like a bespoke recommendation for each reader."
For mid-market ecommerce, that means orchestrating abandoned cart reminders, "complete the set" cross-sells, or VIP refill triggers. For B2B or SaaS, the same principle holds: swap in the next best educational step, the most relevant feature to adopt, or an upgrade path tailored to their specific role.
4. Replace batch-and-blast with intent-based sequencing
Pressure feels lower when communication is coherent and relevant. That’s why sequencing matters: you’re not just sending messages, you’re building an experience that aligns with their journey.
"When revenue targets are tight, the worst thing you can do is improvise a mass campaign," warns Maëlys. "If you have pre-built, intent-based sequences ready, you can scale up communication logically. A standalone blast is an interruption or spam; a planned sequence is an experience."
The practical move is to pre-plan “message intents” (education, value proof, urgency, discovery) and build and test templates. Then, when the business asks for more, you don’t default to “more of everything.” You scale what already works and test systematically.
5. Implement operational hierarchy and protect deliverability
This is the operational backbone. When a customer qualifies for multiple messages in the same window (e.g. a generic promo and a lifecycle milestone), someone (or something) must decide what wins.
Define a message hierarchy so high-intent moments don’t get drowned out by generic blasts. Pair that with dashboards by segment and clear pause/adjust thresholds.
"During peak season, build a different stream for riskier cohorts," recommends Maëlys. "If you’re trying to activate inactive users during major promotions, mitigate the risk by either capping the increase to ~10% over baseline, or isolating the risk by using a separate subdomain."
The principle is the same: protect the core sending reputation that your engaged customers depend on.
6. Spot fatigue before it becomes an opt-out
If you wait for unsubscribes or spam complaints to adjust your pressure, you’re already too late. You need a leading indicator.
Maëlys relies on a simple framework: The 90/30 rule. "If a user was active in the last 90 days but went completely dark in the last 30, that gap is your early warning system. Trigger a targeted, high-value sequence there, before they slip into the long-inactive zone where deliverability risks multiply."
The Ultimate balancing act: Move beyond the Inbox
Even with an excellent email strategy, there’s a limit. Email can’t carry every moment of the customer experience without eventually revealing the “marketing” layer.
Omnichannel is how you keep the journey going while making pressure invisible. It shifts the right type of message to the right channel.
Maëlys’ rule of thumb for choosing the right channel for each moment:
- SMS for transactional updates and rare, high-value urgency.
- In-app / push for app-specific updates and timely nudges about the product.
- Email as the core engine for lifecycle education, storytelling, and personalized recommendations.
Redistributing pressure means using each channel for what it does best and gaining the trust of your subscribers. Do this, and you’ll not only win back the inbox, but you’ll improve the influence of every channel.
