Modern retailers are used to disruption. They regularly have to navigate shifting algorithms, platform outages at odd hours, and ever tightening privacy rules with every legislative cycle. Yet a quieter threat is doing more damage than any of these, and most brands will not spot it on a dashboard until their customer base has already thinned out. 

Customers are switching off from brand messaging altogether, driving a trend we term ‘The Great Unsubscribe’. Our recent Email Impact report, based on insights from more than 400 billion messages, showed how the retail industry recorded 37.4 million unsubscribes across 8 billion sends in 2025. That is close to 1 in every 210 recipients opting out with each send.  

Putting things in perspective, a brand with 100,000 subscribers is losing about 470 people per email sent. Send three promotions a week, and you could lose around 1,400 subscribers weekly. This quickly balloons to over 70,000 across a year in lost customers, all before adding a single new sign-up.  

The data is clear. Shoppers are leaving marketing lists faster than at any point in a decade. raising the stakes for retailers operating in Asia Pacific, a region home to a massive customer base of over 4.3 billion shoppers and a rapidly growing middle class. According to Deloitte, Asia Pacific will drive around two thirds of the world’s new retail sales over the next five years.  

But this drift can be stopped. 

Death by a thousand notifications 

It’s worthwhile first examining the factors driving The Great Unsubscribe. This shift represents a retreat from commercial messaging, likely to have been triggered by an overwhelming volume of multichannel marketing.  

Our experience tells us that the decision to opt out is rarely due to any single email, but stems from months of minor irritations, compounded over time. It could be something as simple as an ill-timed promotion, one too many WhatsApp messages about an abandoned cart, or an email that ignores preferences that a customer has shared weeks earlier. Eventually, a final notification becomes one too many, and triggers the customer to opt out, instantly wiping away years of audience building. 

Winning a customer back is much harder than keeping them subscribed. Operational messages that customers trust most, such as delivery updates, are precisely the touchpoints brands cannot afford to abuse. 

Also Read: The fan vote is broken: Here is what it takes to make people trust it again

Coordinated outreach beats mere volume 

When engagement dips, the standard reflex is to show up everywhere. This could mean sending more emails, launching SMS sequences, boosting social ads, or adding a website chatbot, all in the name of boosting traffic. Conversely, that reflex often ends up accelerating customer losses. Appearing across every channel at once without coordination simply adds to the noise, exacerbating the very issue that customers are trying to escape. 

A resilient communication system gives customers a reason to stay. A better approach thus treats every touchpoint as part of one continuous conversation, where context follows the shopper from channel to channel. A customer who just initiated a return should never receive a cheerful upsell an hour later. In many organisations, customer-facing functions like marketing, sales, and customer service teams still operate in silos. This leads to each team sending uncoordinated messages to the same customer, causing friction. Breaking down these internal silos is critical for personalised brand communications, which is key to stopping list decay.  

This is where owned channels prove their worth. Building audiences on rented land like social media platforms leaves brands highly exposed, with reach being dictated by opaque algorithms that can change at any time. As third-party data continues to decline across browsers and privacy settings, a direct line to customers becomes a retailer’s most valuable asset. Our Email Impact report found that 60 per cent of companies tracking email returns earn over US$10 for every dollar spent, with more than 10 per cent registering returns of more than US$40 for every dollar invested. Owned platforms such as email, SMS, and direct messaging give brands channels they control, serving as their best defense against lost subscribers. 

Also Read: How will AI shopping agents change Amazon and retail?

Keeping customers on your side 

Reversing customer churn requires building resilient communications anchored in two key principles of transparency and autonomy.  

Trust starts with knowing that a message is authentic. In an era where phishing and scams run rampant, customers need immediate clarity on who is reaching out, and why. This is fast becoming an industry-wide direction rather than a competitive nicety. Retailers can build trust by adopting sender authentication standards and transparent branding across all touchpoints. When customers instantly recognise a message as authentic, confidence and trust in the channel remain intact, and these are the elements that will keep them subscribed. 

Digital-first markets in APAC like Singapore have treated trust and confidence as a baseline for years. Since January 2023, Singapore’s SMS Sender ID Registry (SSIR) has mandated any business sending branded SMS to register their organisation name that will be displayed as the sender of the message. Messages from unregistered entities reach customers labelled ‘Likely-SCAM’, which are more often than not indicative of fraud. Retailers do not need to wait for a mandate to act on this. Auditing how consistently a brand identifies itself across the channels it uses, then closing the gaps, costs little and protects the recognition that keeps a channel trusted.  

The most successful retailers opt to empower their customers with control to customise promotional messages by frequency and topics most relevant to them. Having flexibility to determine how frequently messages are sent or to mute specific promotional categories can go a long way to preserve long-term customer relationships without forcing a total unsubscribe.  

None of these demands radical reinvention of how retailers communicate. It requires proper consent, unified data across channels, and messages that earn their place in the inbox. Retailers that treat customer attention as borrowed rather than owned will see far lower drop-off rates. 

The Great Unsubscribe is avoidable for brands willing to build communications that respect the customer as much as they serve the campaign. In Asia Pacific’s increasingly crowded retail market, fine-tuning preferences to retain subscribers is an edge worth earning. 

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