There has been a lot of talk in marketing circles regarding the appropriate amount of email to send to a consumer. Should you send once per month, once per week, multiple times per week, whenever you want, etc... And often over-looked part of this discussion is who ultimately is responsible. Is it the marketer or is it the consumer? Often, I think as marketers, we tend to answer this question not as a marketer, but instead as a consumer. Just like every consumer in the marketplace we are inundated with email messages from work, home, other marketers, transactional messages, etc... The last thing anyone needs is another email message. As such, I think we tend to error on the side of "send less". That being said is it really the marketer's responsibility to be 'sensitive' to how many emails a consumer is receiving in mass? Or is it really more of the consumer's responsibility - they did at the end of the day sign up to receive them?

My take: A marketer holds a responsibility for sending relevant content. Based on the relationship between a marketer and a consumer, I would argue that a marketer has segments of their consumer population where they could absolutely send several messages a week to a single consumer. This level of frequency would not be appropriate for all segments, but certainly some. So in an essence, the marketer has some level of responsibility, however, I believe that the consumer holds a significant portion more - in that at the end of the day it is their inbox to manage

What's your take? I'd love to hear your thoughts.