We’re getting more spam, but we’re also becoming more receptive to e-mail from marketers we recognize and permit. That’s the top-line result of DoubleClick’s fifth annual Consumer E-mail Study, unveiled this week.
The study indicates that the increase in e-mail usage found in past surveys has continued. Today, 81% of consumers say they send and receive e-mail several times a day; 33% say they use it constantly throughout the day, an increase from 20% who said so last year. The DoubleClick survey reports that the average consumer gets 308 e-mails per week and calls 62% of that traffic “spam”.
Permission-based e-mails — those which consumers have opted to accept from retailers or their affiliates — account for about 8% of e-mail received. Despite the rising tide of spam, the average respondent reported opening about 60% of the permission-based e-mails received.
These can involve order confirmations and shipping transactions. Ninety-five percent of consumers in the DoubleClick survey said they expected to receive the former when buying online, and 90% expected to get the latter. Fifty-seven percent of consumers reported receiving permission-based e-mail from online retailers, while 55% got it from brick-and-mortar merchants and 45% from catalog vendors.
Additionally, 65% of consumers said they now receive their monthly bank statements by e-mail, and 54% get other bills and statements that way. When asked what bills they’d like to receive via e-mail but do not yet get, 18% of respondents identified utility and auto insurance bills, and 16% cited home insurance.
And merchants who avoid using e-mail for customer acquisition because of spam fears may be missing a good bet. The DoubleClick survey also found that 52% of consumers said they were interested in offers for related products from their permitted retailers, while 47% said they would be interested in membership rewards programs and 41% in sweepstakes.
But as the 60% open rate even for permit-based e-mail indicates, consumers are sensitive to spam even from their permitted retailers. As in past DoubleClick surveys, respondents once again cited deceptiveness, unknown senders and offensive content as the top three reasons to label e-mail as “spam”. But irrelevant e-mail (57%) or too-frequent e-mail (58%) can also make consumers feel spammed, even when the e-mail comes from permitted retailers. And more than one third (38%) of consumers told DoubleClick they feel spammed if the retailer to whom they gave permission tries to give them a “hard sell”.
What happens to the messages consumers consider spam? It isn’t pretty. Seventy-two percent of consumers just delete them. Almost two-thirds — 64% — now use bulk e-mail folders, up from 59% in 2003; and 77% says they never or rarely check those folders to make sure they don’t contain some wanted e-mail. Forty-nine percent of respondents said they use the “report spam” features from their service provider or e-mail program, a big increase over last year’s 39%. All told, only 7% of spam messages get opened, and 69% of consumers say they open only 1% to 10% of the spam they receive.
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