Most brands assume more emails mean more sales. An Australian travel company found the opposite.
TravelOnline, an Australian travel booking company, spent years running high-frequency, one-size-fits-all email campaigns, sending the same message to its entire list regardless of how customers were engaging. Working with Intuit Mailchimp, the company moved to segmenting customers by engagement instead. Within two months, it recorded a 66 per cent lift in open rates, 38 per cent fewer unsubscribes and a 13 per cent improvement in email ROI.
"The biggest shift for us has been moving away from using automation simply as a way to save time and towards making every customer interaction more relevant," said Sheri Adamson, Marketing Manager at TravelOnline. "Instead of sending the same message to hundreds of thousands of people, we're sending fewer, more relevant communications based on how customers are interacting with our brand."
The data behind the shift
TravelOnline's results echo a wider pattern found in new research from Intuit Mailchimp and Datalily, which analysed more than 44 billion emails and 83 million text messages sent globally through Mailchimp's platform during the 2025 holiday season.
The report, Breaking Through Peak Season Noise, found that more targeted messaging consistently outperformed higher volume. During Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, Australian emails using personalisation, or dynamic content, drove 3 per cent higher average order value than those that didn't. Globally, campaigns using abandoned cart content blocks saw 36 per cent higher open rates and 28 per cent higher click rates than standard campaigns.
Jack Tam, SVP of Product and Engineering at Mailchimp, said the businesses that performed best during peak season were the ones using their own customer data to guide decisions, rather than sending on a fixed schedule.
"Peak season is an opportunity to deepen customer connections," Tam said. "The businesses that thrive use their own customer data to understand when people are ready to act, which messages matter, and where to focus next. This research helps marketers make those decisions with confidence and build customer relationships that endure long after the season ends."
What segmenting actually means
For TravelOnline, the change wasn't about sending fancier emails. It was about sending fewer of them to the right people. Rather than blasting its full list, the company grouped customers by how they were engaging, opening emails, clicking through, or going quiet, and adjusted what each group received.
The broader research suggests this kind of targeting has measurable upside. In Australia, emails using generative AI during peak season recorded a 19 per cent higher order rate and 21 per cent higher conversion rate than those without it, pointing to another way businesses are using data and automation to make messages more relevant rather than simply more frequent.
Why this matters beyond the holidays
TravelOnline's shift happened outside peak season, but the report suggests the same principle applies during the busiest shopping periods too. Nearly 69 per cent of email orders in Australia over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend came from first-time buyers, and globally, 16.6 per cent of first-time holiday buyers made a second purchase in the following quarter. Businesses trying to hold onto those customers may find that fewer, better-targeted emails do more than a high-frequency blast.
For small businesses weighing up whether to send more emails or better ones, TravelOnline's experience points to an answer. Segmenting a list by engagement, rather than treating every subscriber the same, lifted open rates, cut unsubscribes and improved ROI, without increasing send volume.