Achieving scale has been the goal for retailers to create more opportunities and touchpoints to engage consumers – more channels, more campaigns, more personalization. Now, consumers know what to expect from retailers; they’ve signaled a new challenge as they no longer need more messages, they need more relevant ones to gain loyalty and conversions.

According to a new study from Adobe for Business, four in five consumers say they feel overwhelmed by the number of marketing emails they receive from brands, which they estimate to be 50 messages a week. The study of over 1,000 U.S. consumers makes it clear: the issue extends beyond inbox fatigue. Generic brand communications are impacting consumer productivity, eroding trust, altering brand perception, and changing how consumers engage with brands.

This is a larger operational challenge for retailers, balancing consumer relationships across email, SMS, loyalty programs, in-store experiences, and more. Consumers experience brands as a single relationship, even when communications originate from multiple systems, teams, and platforms. Relevance increasingly depends on coordinating those experiences into one continuous journey.

The result? Consumers are experiencing a growing relevance gap, and for them it’s a question of trust and loyalty. 

The orchestration challenge for retailers 

Retailers have been successful with their efforts to scale engagement, as consumers are willing to opt in to brand communications if they meet expectations. When making the choice to sign up for brand communications, consumers most value exclusive deals (61%), free shipping (56%), and loyalty programs (50%).

The difficulty comes next – once consumers have subscribed and they resonate with your brand, you need the individual touchpoints that make sense, such as promotions, loyalty campaigns, product recommendations, and more, to work together as a continuous customer journey rather than creating friction. 

The top ways consumers perceive communications that feel repetitive, mistimed, or disconnected are:

1. The brand doesn’t respect my time – 51%

2. The brand’s marketing automation is flawed – 47%

3. The brand misuses my data for irrelevant offers – 38%

4. The brand doesn’t understand me – 29%

5. The brand has poor audience segmentation – 27%

Our study findings showed that more than three in four (76%) consumers agree that receiving irrelevant marketing communications decreases their trust in a brand. And once that trust goes, it’s hard to earn back.

Due to loud and irrelevant marketing noise, consumers have missed important personal messages (28%), overlooked a bill due date (25%), and seen their productivity decline (23%). This has led to changes in how consumers interact with brand communications, with over a quarter (26%) choosing to start a separate email thread for marketing, while others have considered changing their email address (22%).

Consumers are ready and willing to engage; the issue here is optimizing experience orchestration.  

Every generation is reacting differently — but all roads lead to disengagement

While, naturally, each generation has preferences regarding how frequently and through which channels brands communicate with them, the outcome remains consistent: generic messaging drives a distance between consumers and brands.

The majority of consumers surveyed (69%) will delete a message without opening it if they deem it irrelevant, and this figure rises when we look at each generation’s reactions. 

The top action taken across generations when they receive irrelevant marketing:

• Baby Boomers: Delete it without opening (76%)

• Gen X: Delete it without opening (75%)

• Millennials: Delete it without opening (67%)

• Gen Z: Unsubscribe from the sender (69%)

Baby boomers are the most decisive — 76% delete without opening, 65% mark as spam, and nearly half (48%) block senders entirely. Once they flag you as irrelevant, rebuilding that relationship is genuinely difficult.

 For Millennials (40%) and Gen X (32%), having to unsubscribe from the same brand more than once erodes trust. They’re not changing their minds — they’re telling you your systems aren’t listening. That’s an operational problem, and it’s doing more harm than most retailers realize.

The youngest generation surveyed, Gen Z, introduces a new dynamic: they’re more likely than any other generation to ghost or ignore irrelevant marketing messages (66%). They’re less likely to blame brands directly, too, as they feel the brand’s automation is flawed when untargeted messages are sent, whereas every other generation reports that they feel brands don’t respect their time. What that tells me is that younger consumers expect intelligent, orchestrated experiences. AI-powered orchestration systems can use engagement history, intent signals, and channel context to adapt experiences in real time, rather than relying solely on fixed campaign rules to meet this expectation.

For Gen Z consumers, poor relevance increasingly signals weak personalization systems rather than excessive marketing. For example, Gen Z are the most email-driven purchasers of any generation, with 26% of their online purchases beginning with an email, yet they’re also the fastest to disengage when that email misses the mark. That gap between high potential and high churn risk is exactly what connected customer analytics is built to close.

Coordinated customer journeys are the solution to disengagement

The study’s findings reinforce the fact that personalization is now a consumer expectation. Consumers expect relevance by default, with nearly two in five (39%) saying they are more likely to buy from brands that personalize effectively. However, personalization alone is no longer enough.

Personalization in this context determines what content consumers receive, while orchestration determines when, where, and in what circumstances those experiences appear across the customer journey. Getting both right is the actual challenge — and it requires rethinking how teams prioritize, measure, and coordinate.

1. Move from campaign-centric execution to journey-centric orchestration

Communications should move with consumers as they navigate fluidly between email, mobile apps, stores, loyalty programs, service interactions, and digital experiences. To deliver connected experiences, there needs to be visibility across customer, campaign, and content systems, to enable teams to coordinate touchpoints rather than optimize channels independently.

2. Optimize around customer intent rather than communication volume

Evaluate how you’re measuring engagement. Instead of focusing only on send volume and channel goals, consider how consumers experience your communications. Relevance, timing, and usefulness matter more than message volume, and a single meaningful interaction can have a greater impact than several disconnected ones. 

3. Catch communication friction earlier with journey analytics

Clear signals of communication friction, like spam reports and unsubscribes, remain important, but new indicators increasingly matter, such as:

• Notification muting

• Repeated exposures

• Engagement drop-offs

• Channel abandonment

• Ignored messaging patterns

AI-driven journey analytics can help retailers identify early signs of disengagement by connecting signals such as notification muting, repeated exposure, and channel abandonment before consumers formally opt out. Catching those signals early is the difference between a fixable friction point and a lost customer.

Relevance is becoming retail’s next competitive advantage

The message to brands and retailers is pretty consistent: consumer attention is finite, their trust is conditional, and relevance is what determines whether you keep either.

The next phase of customer experience is not about sending more messages or creating more touchpoints. It is about orchestration. The brands that succeed will be those that deliver connected experiences that capture consumer attention, understand intent, and create value at the right moment.

Consumers aren’t opting out of marketing — they’re opting out of irrelevance, and retailers who understand that distinction are the ones who’ll win. The path forward isn’t sending less; it’s understanding more. If you want to see what that looks like in practice — how journey analytics turns disconnected signals into experiences consumers actually value — this is where to start.

About the author

Erin Fuentes is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Adobe’s CX Analytics organization, where she supports go-to-market strategy for Customer Journey Analytics. With over four years at Adobe, she has specialized in translating complex data and analytics products into clear, customer-focused messaging — spanning product launches, web strategy, and go-to-market enablement. Erin believes the best marketing decisions start with connected insights and a clear view of the customer journey.