Over-reporting of Spam a Problem for Marketers?
by DT - August 4th, 2006 2:46 pm
Do you have – oh, of course you have – an e-mail inbox overflowing with unwanted messages? It’s becoming the bane of internet living, as we all know, having to clear our mail every day of spam. I have a friend who has to do it every HOUR.
But how much, I wonder, is this clearing operation we all do an example of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater†– as my old Scottish grandmother used to rather graphically say?
According to a new survey (Aug 3rd, 2006) from e-mail marketing services company Return Path, more than one in three consumers mistakenly report e-mail that they have actually chosen to sign up for as “junk” or “spam,”
Out of 2,035 Web users who were surveyed 36 percent said they hit the “spam” button when they want to unsubscribe to e-mail that they have previously agreed to receive. Almost that same proportion–31 percent–said they don’t use the “unsubscribe” links that are found in commercial e-mails.
The over-reporting of spam of course presents a troubling problem for e-mail marketers because senders that have been wrongly characterized as spammers can wrongly end up on the blacklists that are amassed by service providers.
The odd thing is – and it’s a hard obstacle to get past – that many consumers appear to believe they have no choice. Those who trash their messages as junk were asked why they didn’t take what the well-informed would see as the obvious course of clicking the “unsubscribe” option. Their general answer? A lot said that they were suspicious.
They thought it could all be part of a sneaky plan to hook them further – that clicking â€unsubscribe†would simply result in yet more e-mail. Verbalized reasons given by respondents for not trusting this option included: “If I do I just get more junk†and “They only use this as a ruse to certify an email address,” and “Most often they do not work.”
The study also found – something that’s decidedly unsurprising in today’s competitive e-commerce climate – that a large proportion of the e-mails that consumers receive every day are commercial in nature. Nearly half of those surveyed said that over 60 percent of their inbox contents were commercial mailings.
The commercial mailers maybe need to educate their addressees better about their options.
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