Irrelevant marketing drives consumers to disengage

Three-quarters of UK consumers regularly receive marketing they consider irrelevant, according to research from Optimizely that points to growing fatigue with generic, duplicated, and poorly targeted brand communications.

The study found that 69% of consumers frequently received duplicate messages or emails, while the same proportion believed communications were generic or insufficiently tailored.

Some 61% said they felt overwhelmed by the amount of marketing they received. A further 56% believed it was becoming harder to find brands communicating in a useful and engaging way.

The effect extends beyond irritation. Some 42% said they disengaged when content was irrelevant, and 35% were more likely to unsubscribe from emails or other communications after a poor or irrelevant experience.

The findings form part of The Marketer’s Survival Guide, based on responses from 1,000 UK consumers and 100 UK marketers. The publicly available material does not identify fieldwork dates, respondent recruitment, weighting, or an independent polling provider.

The percentages should therefore be treated as Optimizely’s survey findings rather than definitive measurements of all UK adults. They nevertheless illustrate the operational risk created when campaign volume grows faster than relevance.

Tara Corey, senior vice-president of marketing at Optimizely, said: “Consumers can tell when marketing wasn’t made for them, and our research shows they’re tuning it out because of it.”

Marketing teams acknowledge the constraints behind the problem. Some 60% said they often launched campaigns without enough time or data to optimise them, while 54% moved from one campaign to the next without properly evaluating performance.

Two-thirds said managing multiple platforms created unnecessary work. Fragmented customer data, disconnected content systems, separate analytics tools, and inconsistent consent records can prevent teams from establishing what a customer has received or how they responded.

The result can be duplication across email, mobile, advertising, ecommerce, and customer-service channels. A message may be individually plausible but become irrelevant when another department has already sent the same offer or the customer has completed the intended action.

Personalisation involves more than placing a name in a subject line. Useful communications require reliable data about context, preferences, purchasing history, lifecycle stage, frequency, and consent, together with controls preventing outdated information from driving decisions.

Artificial intelligence can accelerate content production, testing, and targeting, but increased output does not resolve weak data or unclear strategy. Poorly governed systems may create more variations of the same generic campaign and send them through additional channels.

Corey said: “The real opportunity isn’t more content, it’s better content, and that means using AI to clear away the busywork so marketers can actually focus on strategy and creativity again.”

BQ’s earlier examination of reactive marketing workflows found that campaign administration was limiting planning, experimentation, analysis, and creative work. The consumer findings show how those internal constraints can affect the quality of communication received by customers.

Brands facing rising acquisition costs cannot assume that sending more communications will compensate for weaker engagement. Duplicate and irrelevant messages can reduce response rates, increase unsubscribes, damage sender reputation, and make customers less receptive when a useful offer arrives.

The commercial cost may be distributed across several systems and therefore difficult to identify. Marketing dashboards can report campaign activity and short-term conversion without measuring the cumulative effect of fatigue across the customer relationship.

Reducing that risk requires shared data, frequency controls, clear ownership, suppression rules, and measurement extending beyond immediate clicks. Teams also need time to assess which segments, messages, and channels produce value rather than simply recording that a campaign was delivered.

Relevance cannot be achieved entirely through automation. Customers may respond to clarity, timing, restraint, tone, service quality, and evidence that a company understands their circumstances. Those qualities depend on strategic judgement as much as technical capability.

The survey presents a warning for brands using AI primarily to increase content volume. The advantage is more likely to sit with organisations combining automation with reliable customer information, coordinated channels, and the confidence to communicate less often when there is nothing useful to say.