Consumer email report
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow
Bear in mind that the survey reports on what people say they do, rather than observed behavior (the two are rarely the same*). But the insights make fascinating reading.
I'd urge you to read the 9 page report in its entirety, especially the analysis. Consumers basically rate the marketing community in terms of how well we're doing at sending relevant emails.
There's also material in there on what gets attention, how people react to "bad" email practices and similar.
A couple of key stats that jumped out at me:
1. The two biggest influencers behind the decision to read an email are trust/awareness and previous experience with the sender's emails.
This gets to the core of permission email marketing: building trust and delivering consistent value. You need to think in terms of providing regular value from the recipient's perspective and not in terms of short-term boosts to sales.
2. 44% of respondents considered "a high volume of what they receive to be 'junk from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me'."
On the surface that seems a little worrying.
But think of it like this...email marketing works. And yet the above stat suggests there is clear room for improvement in terms of engaging recipients. So there are still plenty of gains to be made. That's good news.
[*This is where testing becomes so important. Using consumer opinion and your own experience and intuition to come up with plausible alternatives for, say, a subject line or an email frequency. Then testing to see which one works best.]
More on email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, holiday emails, consumer email habits
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1 Comments:
Mark -- Thanks so much for your plug of our survey! I totally agree with your call out of the difference between what consumers say and what they do. Surveys only take us so far. But, one thing I find continually fascinating is the level of sophistication subscribers report in how they perceive and handle email. They get the difference between unsub buttons and this is spam buttons. They know (or, at least think they know) when they signed up for stuff and when they didn't. I think this is important for us all to grasp. Even if what they ultimately do differs, understanding that subscribers think about these issues is helpful as we create compelling email marketing.
Thanks again for the featuring our survey!
Tami M. Forman
Director, Consumer Marketing
Return Path
tami.forman@returnpath.net
By 
Tami Forman, on
25 January, 2007
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