Consumers Fed Up with Excess E-Mail, Survey Shows
If one single word comes to mind after the holiday e-mail deluge, it is relevance.
Consumers were more likely to delete unwanted e-mails or report the senders as spammers, according to a survey by Return Path Inc. And that means marketers did “a worse job, not better, being relevant to large percentages of their e-mail file,” the company noted.
Fewer people noticed an increase in their e-mail volume than they did in 2004. But at 83.4%, that was hardly a low number. And 72.5% said they got more e-mail than they expected during the season.
Worse yet, they classified most of those excess messages as spam or junk. Almost half said most of it was from companies they had done business with, and a similar number reported that they got more permission-based e-mail than they expected when they signed up.
“Consumers have short memories for subscriptions and permission,” Return Path said. “About half of the respondents felt that marketers abused their permission grant and sent more than expected.”
According to Return Path, a third signed up for e-mail programs without a clear frequency expectation. That is the top source of complaints to ISPs, the company noted.
Only 16.9% described the excess as overwhelming. But that’s twice the percentage in 2004.
Asked how they dealt with the overflow messages, 68% said they deleted them unread, an 8% jump over the prior year. More ominously, 33.6% reported the sender as a spammers to their ISP, an increase of over 10 percentage points compared with 2004. In addition, 30.5% unsubscribed, a 7% leap over 2004.
When do people open an e-mail? For 60.6%, it is when they know and trust the sender, roughly the same as in 2004. Another 47.7% said it is when they previously opened an e-mail from the firm and found it valuable. That number rose from 30.1%.
Subject lines persuade 42.9% of all respondents to open messages, and 22.3% cited the preview window.
Half of the respondents responded to 3-mail offers, and almost half said that 3-mail had some influence on their shopping habits. That reflects a 10% increase over 2004. Finally 91.4% of the consumers surveyed shopped online, compared with 73.5% last year.
