Don’t think for a second that these emails are just sent out willy nilly. The marketing departments will have huge amounts of data on click rates, conversion rates, which day of the week is best to send, is it better morning or afternoon etc etc. If sending four emails a week was having a negative effect on the impact of the marketing emails they would know almost immediately and would stop doing it.
As someone in a very large marketing department I can confirm this 100%. Not all bike shops to such a degree but definitely the big ones.
However really the idea of one size fits all is quickly getting old. While the average email performance might show them this approach works, this thread shows different people want different things and they should really be able to adapt to send less frequently to those that don’t want them very often, and more frequently to those that do.
And yes GDPR is going to come to a shock to a lot of marketing departments I expect. We have put a huge amount of time and effort into prepping, I suspect not everyone has, especially if they can’t handle a basic unsubscribe request at the moment.