Ever mass-deleted a bunch of impersonal emails from your inbox? Brand fatigue is a real threat to your marketing strategy. Let's discuss the tricks and tips to avoid the burn out in your marketing influence.

Brand fatigue sucks

So you have all had this happen to you. I promise you have. It's happened in your email. It's happened in your social streams. It's happened through advertising in the real world, online and offline. I'll give you an illustration. So I sign up for this newsletter. I decide, “Hey, I want to get some houseplants. My house has no greenery in it.” So I sign up for Green Dude Houseplants' newsletter. What do I get? Well, I get a, “Welcome to Our Newsletter.” Oh, okay.

And then maybe the next day I get, “Meet Our New Hires.” Meet our new hires? I'm sure that your new hires are very important to you and your team, but I just got introduced to your brand. I'm not sure I care that much. To me, you're all new hires. You might as well be, right? I don't know you or the team yet. “Best Summer Ever Event,” okay, maybe, maybe an event. “Edible Backyard Gardens, you know, I don't have a backyard. I was signing up for a houseplant newsletter because it was in my house. “See Us at the Garden Show,” I don't want to go to the garden show. I was going to buy from you. That's why I'm online.

How to cause brand fatigue

It's not just the value of the messaging. It's the frequency that it happens at. You've seen this. You sign up for emails from a cool interesting company you take interest in or wish to buy from.  You thought it was a really cool idea until you get completely inundated with messages from them. Some of them are actually worthy of your participation. But you end up getting so much email from them that you soon being to just hit Delete as soon as it comes to your inbox.

If you are a subscriber, you probably get a new email every time a new crawl is completed, and a campaign is set up, and you have new rankings data. Some of that's really important, right? Like if you're paying attention to this particular site's rankings and you want to see every time you get an update, well yeah, you need that email. But it's actually kind of tough to opt in to which ones you want and with what frequency and control it all from one place.

1) Too many messages on a medium
Brand fatigue happens when there are too many messages, just too many raw messages on a medium. You start to see the same brand, the same name, the same person again and again. Their logo, their colors, the association you have, it just becomes background noise. Your brain goes into this mode where it just filters it out because it can't handle the volume of stuff that's coming through. It needs a filtration mechanism. So it starts to identify and associate your brand or your logo or your name or a person's name with “filter.” Filter that out. That goes in the background.

2) Value provided is too low or infrequent to deserve attention
It also happens when the value provided is too low or too infrequent to deserve attention. So this might be what I'm talking about with FounderDating. One out of every maybe five or six messages, I'm like, “Oh yeah, that was interesting. I should pay attention to that.” But when it becomes too infrequent, that same filtration happens. Too few of the high value messages means you're not going to pay attention, you're not going to engage with that brand, with that company anymore. All of us marketers will see that in the engagement rates. No matter the medium, we can look at our numbers and see that those are going down on a percentile basis, and that gets really frustrating.

3) The messaging can't be effectively tuned or controlled by the user
It is a problem if you do not have that one email control center where you say how often you want exactly which messages updating you of which notifications about which campaigns, and newsletter and so on. So your message frequency is either all the time high or very high and so you're, “I don't like any of those options.” One extreme or the other. Very frustrating.

How NOT to cause brand fatigue

Here are some suggestions, platform by platform.

Email

Start very conservative with your email marketing and highly personal. In fact, I would actually recommend personally sending all the messages out to your first few hundred users if you possibly can, because you will get a great rapport that you develop individually with person by person. That will give you a sense for what your audiences like and what kind of messaging they prefer, and they'll know they can reply directly to you.

You'll create that highly-engaged experience through email that will mean that, as you scale, you have the experience from the past to tell you how often you can and can't email people, what they care about and don't, what they filter and don't, what they're looking for from you, etc. You can then watch your open, unsubscribe and engagement rates through your email program. No matter what program you might be using, you can almost always see these. Then you can watch for, “Oh, we had a spike.” That spike is a good thing. That means that people were highly engaged on this email. Let's figure out what resonated there. Let's go talk to folks. Let's reach out to the people who engaged with it and just say, “Hey, why did you love this? What did you love about it? What can we do to give you more value like this?”

Or you watch for dips. Then you can say, “Oh man, the last three email newsletters that we've sent out, we've seen successive declines in engagement and open rates, and we've seen a rise in unsubscribe rates. We're doing something wrong. What's going on? What's the root cause? Is it who we're acquiring? Is it new people that signed up, or is it old-timers who are getting frustrated with the new stuff we're sending out? Does this fit with our strategy? What can we fix?”

Be careful. The thing that sucks about brand fatigue is a lot of platforms, email included, have systems, algorithmic systems set up to penalize you for this. With email, if you get high unsubscribes and low engagement, that will actually kill your long-term chances for email marketing success, because Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's various mail programs and whatever installed mail your targets might have, whatever they're using, you will no longer be able to break through those email filters.

The email filter that Gmail has says, “Hey, a lot of people click Unsubscribe and Report Spam. Let's put this in the Promotions tab.” Or, “Hey, a lot of people are clicking Report Spam. You know what? Let's just block this sender entirely.” Or, “Gosh, this person has in the past not engaged very much with these messages. We're going to not make them high priority anymore.” Gmail has that automatic high priority system. So you're getting algorithmically turned into noise even if you might have had something that your customers really cared about.

Blog or other content platform

If you don't test, you'll never know. You'll never know the limits of what your audience wants, what will frustrate them, what will delight them. I recommend you don't create content unless you can have a great answer for the question, “Who will help amplify this and why?” I don't mean, like, “Oh, well I think people who really like houseplants will help amplify this.” That's not a great answer.

A great answer is, “Oh, you know, I know this guy named Jerry. Jerry runs a Twitter account that's all about gardening. Jerry loves our houseplants. He's a big fan of this. He's particularly interested in flowering cacti. I know if we publish this post, Jerry will help amplify it.” That's a great answer. You have 10 Jerrys, great. Hit Publish. Go for it. You don't? Why are you making it?

Watch your browse rate, your conversion rate, and conversion rate…. I don't mean necessarily all the way to whatever you're selling, your ecommerce store products or your subscription or whatever that is. Conversion rate could be conversion rate to an email newsletter or to following you on a social platform or whatever.

You can watch time on site and amplification per post to essentially get a sense for like, “Hey, as we're producing content, are we seeing the metrics that would indicate that our content marketing is being successful?” If the answer to that is no, well we need to retool it. It turns out there's actually no prize for hitting Publish.

You might think that your job as a content producer or a content marketer is to make content every day or content every week. That's not your job. Your job is to have success with the metrics that are going to predict and correlate to the strategies you need as a business to acquire customers, to grow your marketing channels, to grow your brand's impact, to help people, whatever it is that your mission is.

I highly recommend finding your audiences' sweet spot for both focus and frequency. If you do those things, you're going to do a great job with avoiding brand fatigue around your content.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media

Twitter, generally speaking, is more forgiving as a platform. Facebook has more of those algorithmic elements to punish you for low engagement.

Users of both, however, are pretty sensitive, nearly equally sensitive. It's not like Facebook users are more sensitive. It's just that Facebook's platform is more sensitive because Facebook doesn't show you all the content you could possibly see.

Twitter is just a super simplistic newsfeed algorithm. It's just, who posted last. So Twitter has that real time kind of thing. So I would still say for both of these, aim to only share stuff that gets high engagement, especially as your brand.

You want that high engagement over and over again because that will predict more people paying attention to you when you do post, going back and looking through your old social posts, subscribing to you, following you, all that sort of thing, considering you a leader. You can watch both Twitter Analytics and your Facebook page's stats to see if you're having a dip or a spike, where you're having success, where you're not.

So if I see something doing extremely well on Twitter or on Google+ or on LinkedIn, I go, “Aha, that's the kind of thing I should post on Facebook. That will increase my engagement there. Now I can go post and get more engagement next time and build up my authority in Facebook's newsfeed algorithm. So with all of this stuff, hopefully, as you're producing content, sharing content, building an email subscription, building a blog platform, you're going to have a little less brand fatigue and a little more engagement from your users.