Does sending more emails increase unsubscribes?

Does sending more emails increase unsubscribes?

Here's the short version of what I found. I looked at 4 consumable brands, 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. At 3 of the 4, unsubscribes didn't go up when the brand sent more.

That leaves one brand where the pattern didn't hold. That's the honest part. More email isn't free, and one out of four is enough to tell you to send more with a plan, not blindly.

So the answer is: sometimes, but not as often as founders assume. And when it does happen, it usually tells you something about who's getting the emails.

Why the unsubscribe rate is the wrong thing to stare at

An unsubscribe feels like a breakup. It isn't. Someone who was never going to buy leaving your list isn't a real loss.

What actually costs you money is different:

• People who stay subscribed but never click. They don't buy, and every send to them tells inbox providers your email isn't wanted.
• Spam complaints. Someone who hits "report spam" instead of unsubscribing hurts your sending reputation far more than an unsubscribe does.
• Revenue per person dropping. If you double your sends and revenue per person falls off a cliff, you're just making noise.

If you only watch the unsubscribe rate, you'll miss all three. Watch it, sure. Just don't let it be the only number in the room.

How to send more without burning your list

The trick is that "send more" shouldn't mean "send more to everyone." It should mean sending more to the people who've earned it.

Here's how I'd set it up:

1. Build engagement tiers. Split your list by how recently people clicked or bought. Something like: bought or clicked in the last 60 days, clicked in the last 61 to 180 days, and everyone else.
2. Give each tier its own frequency. Your most engaged tier can handle the most email. The middle tier gets the bigger moments. The bottom tier gets your best offers only.
3. Add frequency one tier at a time. Start with your top tier. If clicks and revenue per person hold up there, then think about the next one down.
4. Clean up the bottom. People who haven't clicked in a long time should go through a sunset flow, a last-chance series before you stop sending to them. More on that in Klaviyo sunset flow.

The point of the tiers is that your best people get more of you, and the people who've checked out stop dragging down your numbers.

Use segments so more email goes to people who want it

The best example I have of why this matters comes from a fitness tech brand. One campaign to an engaged segment of 7,145 people earned $0.19 per person. A full-list blast to 49,475 people earned $0.04 per person.

That's almost 5x per person. The blast still reached about 7x more people, so I'm not saying it made nothing. I'm saying the extra 42,000-odd people added a lot of sends and not much money per send.

When you want to send more, that's the move: add sends to segments like the 7,145, not the 49,475. I lay out the segments I'd start with in email segmentation for ecommerce.

Judge more email by clicks, not opens

If you're testing a higher send frequency, opens will lie to you. Across the same 4 brands, open rate tracked revenue at 0.32. Click rate tracked it at 0.65, about twice as closely.

For one of those brands, open rate actually tracked revenue negatively. More opens, less money. Apple Mail auto-opens pushed open rates past 85% on some segments, which tells you those "opens" weren't people.

So when you add sends, track three things per tier:

• Click rate
• Revenue per person
• Unsubscribes and spam complaints

If clicks and revenue per person hold steady while volume goes up, keep going. If they drop, pull back on that tier, not on your whole program.

When should you actually send more?

There are a few times where I'd push frequency without overthinking it:

• Big sale windows. BFCM is the obvious one. I lay out a full send plan in BFCM email strategy.
• Restocks. When something sells out, the restock email is your biggest send of the month. A snack brand doing about $650K a month made $48,771 from one restock email to 30,498 people.
• New product launches. A haircare brand's launch email made $31,059 from 395 orders.

None of these feel like spam to the person getting them, because they're news. People who want your product want to know it's back or that there's something new.

Where these numbers come from

The pooled numbers come from 4 consumable brands, 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. It's a small sample, so read the 3-of-4 finding as directional. The single-brand examples each come from one brand I've worked with, described by category instead of name.

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WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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