I wanted a new pillow. I did my research and decided on what I wanted. The brand’s site offered 20% off if I gave them my email address, so I did. At checkout, the code didn’t work. It turned out the pillow was already on sale, and therefore the discount didn’t stack.
That’s fine. It happens all the time. But what happened next shouldn’t.
I got pulled into some things at work and left the site. Over the next 24 hours, that address got seven emails from the same company. A welcome email. Then a recommendation email. Then a reminder that my 20% was waiting. Then an email nudge about my cart. Then an email from the CEO telling me how great the company was. Then another recommendation email. Then another reminder from the CEO about the 20% coupon. The theme never changed: come back and use the discount that didn’t work.
This isn’t a story about a bad brand. They’re not. Most companies with a modern email platform could do this to a customer tomorrow, and plenty already do.
Nobody Decided to Send Seven Emails
That’s the uncomfortable part. Seven emails in a day rarely come from one bad decision. They come from four or five reasonable ones that nobody bothered to look at together as a single system.
Someone built a welcome series for new subscribers (very sensible). Then someone else built a flow to remind people of a discount they’d received which they hadn’t used (very sensible until it’s no longer relevant to what they actually want). The cart abandonment flow had a pillow in my cart and duly did its job. The promotions team then had an unrelated recommendations campaign which they ran to their entire list (including people who’d just joined an hour previously).
Each of those flows probably tests well on its own. Each has an owner who can point to its open rate. What nobody owns is the customer’s inbox, which is the only place all of them actually meet.
The First Promise Was Broken
The brand’s first interaction with me was an offer that didn’t work. Then every email after that reminded me of it.
A signup discount is a small promise, but it’s the first one a brand makes. When it fails at checkout, and the follow-up emails keep pushing it anyway, the message isn’t “we value you.” It’s “nobody here is paying attention.”
The Bill Comes Later
The obvious cost is the unsubscribe. Less patient pillow shoppers than I probably hit that link somewhere around email five. That’s a prospect whose acquisition was paid for, but now unreachable by the cheapest channel.
But the less obvious cost is worse. Some people won’t just unsubscribe, they’ll mark you as spam. It doesn’t matter that they signed up. Mailbox providers don’t care about individual signups, they care about the aggregate. For example, Gmail wants bulk senders’ complaint rates under 0.1% and treats 0.3% as a hard line. Senders that go beyond that threshold lose inbox placement. That doesn’t just affect the people who complained. It affects everyone on the list, including the customers who actually wanted to hear from you.
The seven email day essentially borrows against every email you’ll send in the next quarter. The revenue report only shows the clicks from email 4. It doesn’t show the inbox placement you’ve quietly lost.
Fixing It Is Mostly About Ownership
Most email platforms already have the tools to prevent this. What’s generally missing is someone whose job it is to actually use them across the board, not just in one particular flow.
Start with one person or one team having ownership of the customer’s entire inbox and the authority to say no to other teams wanting to send. Then establish rules that apply universally. There should be a frequency cap (limiting the number of marketing emails a customer receives per day or per week regardless of how many flows are trying to get in). A new subscriber should only get the welcome email on day one and not the full promotional calendar. If a discount fails at checkout, the reminders around that discount should cease.
Then organize email around the customer journey, not which team built the flow. New subscriber, first-time buyer, repeat customer, lapsing customer: each stage gets its own plan, and a customer is in exactly one of them at a time.
Finally, measure the list, not just the send. Track unsubscribes and spam complaints by flow, watch inbox placement, and treat a jump in either as seriously as you would a drop in revenue. If the only number anyone looks at is revenue per email, every team will keep adding emails.
Try It Yourself
Here’s a test worth running this week. Sign up for your own email offer with a fresh email address, try the code on something that’s already on sale, and count what lands in that inbox over the next 24 hours. Read every one as if you were the customer.
If the count surprises you, you’re not alone, and it’s fixable. At SCIGON, we help marketing and commerce teams untangle the automations, tools, and ownership behind the customer experience. Hence, the next pillow shopper hears from you because it helps them, not because six flows fired at once.
I did end up buying the pillow, for what it’s worth. It’s a really good product. I just don’t open their emails.