What was the last marketing communication you have seen? Most probably, you even don't remember. Well, that’s what ad fatigue is all about.

While we often hear about fight fatigue campaigns launched by healthcare organizations, many marketers don’t raise awareness of fatigue. They bombard target audiences with standard ad creatives pumping crazy money into digital campaigns that never pay off. Because of the banner blindness developed by up to 86% of users, social media ads, contextual advertising, and other promotions remain unnoticed. The email open rates also steadily decline. In 2020, automated welcome and cart abandonment emails had an open rate of around 30% only.

The lack of awareness of issues related to ad fatigue results in substantial financial losses for companies. They also fail to engage customers and encourage repeat purchases with quality communications.

The good news is there are ways to cure ad fatigue. You can complement digital communications with offline channels, change their content, frequency, design, and more.

What is Ad Fatigue? + Types of Ad Fatigue

Ad fatigue is when a brand shows its ads so often that customers get used to them and stop noticing. It’s a normal reaction of the human brain that filters out repetitive content. With the influx of digital advertising and the growing competition in the e-commerce market, ad fatigue research only gains importance.

Ad Fatigue Types

Ad fatigue can be broadly classified by digital communication channels. Social media promotions (Instagram, Facebook ads), contextual advertising, and online communications like emails are the most common categories.

In our article, we will focus on managing ad fatigue caused by digital communications. There are multiple alternatives to reach out to customers through the noise of digital advertising with the suitable approaches.

Ad Fatigue Research Approaches to Check if Your Customers Ignore Communications

To run ad fatigue research for online ads, you need to measure click-through rate (CTR). When it comes to online communications, other metrics are required. You will have to determine how many customers open your messages and whether they find the offered content useful.

To check the effectiveness of your digital messages, use the following ad fatigue research metrics:

• Lower email open rates. When someone doesn’t open your first, second, or tenth email, it means what it means. The person is tired of your messages. Therefore, when your email open rates decline, it’s time to perform ad fatigue research.
• Decrease in customer engagement and conversions. This metric reflects the effectiveness of your communications. If your digital communications don’t make leads take action, this also may be a sign of ad fatigue. You will need to analyze what prevents people from converting and when they leave the funnel. In case it happens after the delivered promotions or messages, you might need to change your communications.
• A/B testing of different types of communications. It’s one of the most reliable ways to see which messages are working, and which ones trigger ad fatigue. You can run A/B tests in many marketing tools like email clients or implement them manually by testing specific messages on two small customer groups.
• Bounce rate and less time per viewing digital messages. Many email clients record the average time users dedicate to delivered messages. If you notice that people don’t pay much attention to the content in your messages and quickly skip it, ad fatigue may be the reason.
  

These simple methods should help you run ad fatigue research and understand the overall customer attitude towards your marketing efforts. If you see that people start losing interest in your communications, don’t sink in despair. We know proven ways to win the leads back.

5 Fight Fatigue Campaign Approaches in Customer Communications

Based on our experience and best industry practices, we want to recommend several effective ways to improve ads performances. Try these fight fatigue campaign approaches for your marketing communications to reactivate customers suffering from ad fatigue.

#1. Fight fatigue campaign approach. Send Trigger-Based Communications

Apart from standard communications like a welcome email, you should deliver tailored marketing messages based on real-time customers’ actions. For example, you can send a discount on a specific product after a customer views it on your website. These messages are more likely to be opened since they give customers measurable benefits. Sometimes ad fatigue vanishes when the offer is attractive enough.

#2. Fight fatigue campaign approach. Combine Emails with Offline Messages

Numerous ad fatigue researches show that digital content abundance is among the main issues related to fatigue. To reduce the pressure of online messages, you can complement them with offline approaches like direct mail. Custom leaflets, postcards, and other offline marketing communications are a great alternative to reach the target audiences that have stopped responding to emails. Once you grasp customers' attention with offline messages, they will become more likely to respond online.

Note that you will need to collect and verify customer addresses if you decide to run mail marketing campaigns. Therefore, it’s important to pick marketing software that both automatically delivers mail and runs address checks.

Find Out What Industries Need Address Verification Most

#3. Fight fatigue campaign approach. Test Several Designs and Experiment With Wording

Ensure everyone understands the risks of fatigue from online communications in your marketing team. They should test different designs and content each time they start a campaign. In many cases, slight changes in the text, colors, fonts, or CTAs make a difference. This way, you will be able to pick the most effective ad campaign and improve open rates.

#4. Fight fatigue campaign approach. Adopt Omnichannel Practices

Omnichannel campaigns are a new powerful trend in marketing. Being highly customer-centric, they enable marketers to show the most relevant content across multiple channels. Automated marketing software initiates customer interactions that are the most efficient at a specific moment. If a customer is more likely to respond to emails, they will get an email. Those who are likely to check social media messages, will receive a social media message.

#5. Fight fatigue campaign approach. Monitor Your Campaigns and Run Ad Fatigue Research

To know that the measures taken pay off, you should continuously collect data on your online and offline communications. It will show customers’ reactions to different kinds of messages and help you understand whether the adopted fight fatigue campaign works. Continuous tracking is also essential to record the moment when people start ignoring your communications. It allows you to be proactive and quickly reduce the impact of ad fatigue.

How Inkit’s Products Help to Attract Attention of the Audience with Ad Fatigue

Inkit is a reach enablement platform (REP) that enables teams to combine digital and offline communications. Its document rendering tool Render automatically converts HTML files to PDFs and stores them for further online or offline delivery. This gives marketers flexibility regarding channels of communication and helps to deal with ad fatigue.

To ensure offline communications always reach the target, Inkit’s Verify automatically checks customers’ addresses. The verification increases the accuracy of offline communications and makes them a reliable alternative to online messages. If you want to automate offline delivery, Inkit also helps. Its Send product automatically forwards mail to offline printers and manages the delivery.

In addition to the mentioned benefits, Inkit is super easy to integrate with other tools via API. Thanks to hundreds of integrations supported, you can use Inkit’s platform for comprehensive omnichannel marketing ad campaigns.

Want to fight ad fatigue with Inkit? Contact us to get the demo.