If you're the VP or whatever in charge of the new font launch, your performance is measured on how many people pick up the new font. You are happy to sacrifice anything else your company is doing to make your launch succeed even slightly more because it is the only thing you are evaluated on. If you send out a spammy promotional email to the entire subscriber base, and it causes 20% of your email list to unsubscribe, but it also gets 2% of them to click through and buy something, that is an absolute win for you, the lower level leader. It's disastrous for the company, but that's not what you're being evaluated on.
Whenever I see a company do something that seems like it's sacrificing some long term brand trust for short term gains, I see a misincentivized middle manager.
You think your favorite app has a "WE ADDED AI" button because the users were clamoring for it? No, of course not. But some executive somewhere is being judged on customer adoption of the new AI feature, and so now the AI is the biggest button on the screen, to the detriment of the overall usability of the app.
Give me that in a newsletter and I might read it. Give me some info about an "awesome" new "release" and lose me. That release is important for everybody working there, but outside of that it id irrelevant as a story.
Wanna sell a new industrial font? Write about interesting industrial fonts and then in the end tie it to yours. People that read that far may just click and buy.
I would say that email is inherently a somewhat noisy channel. You have little meta-data about how appropriate and timely a message is, so often you are sending in the dark. There are many downsides to the protocol and its place in our lives but it does carry a lot of important communication.
Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?
What companies _used_ to do is have "Subscribe to our newsletter" on their site - either for non-account holders, or as a separate checkbox when setting up an account.
Same with email frequency — would be trivial to add "when do you want to hear from us?" as a question "when we release a new font / when we make changes to a font you've purcahsed / only account related".
We have the patterns for all this already established.