We are sometimes so wrapped up in our own marketing emails that we start to wonder how anyone could not want to click on each and every call to action.
Campaign results ought to provide some perspective, as should reader feedback. But another view of things comes from surveys of Internet users and their general email habits, preferences and opinions.
The responses can make intriguing reading: I spent a few hours with numerous surveys and pulled out some key stats and lessons for you.
Part 1 examines how people view commercial email. Part 2 reviews perceptions of spam, the role of value, and branding implications. Part 3 explores how to manage these perceptions and deal with discontent.
First the good news…
Phew…email is not dead
You know that and I know that. But what about the general population? After all, we’re biased. Fortunately, it seems they still use email. For example…
- 87% of North Americans surveyed in the Epsilon Global Consumer Email Study gave email as their primary tool for online personal communication
- Over half of respondents surveyed for Merkle’s 2009 View from the Inbox “couldn’t live without it”
- An ExactTarget survey of UK and US consumers found 6% had decreased their email use over the last six months, while 29% had increased it (boosted by increased smartphone ownership and those who use social media heavily)
- The 2009 ACTA survey in Germany found 75% of Internet users using email, an increase of 5% over the previous year.
- …lots more stats like this can be found at EmailisnotDead.com and in Morgan Stewart’s round up post
Our addiction to email continues unabated, but that says little about attitudes to marketing email…
People like commercial email, but…
In a MAAWG consumer survey, marketing emails and newsletters were the two lowest-ranked type of email communication.
It’s a healthy reminder that people use email for many reasons other than to get marketing messages. Email is not email marketing. The world will keep on turning for people if your email program finished today.
However, it’s easy (and wrong) to drop into the mindset that marketing email is all about getting a response out of unwilling recipients. That mindset can lead to ever more desperate calls to action that can turn people off your messages.
Even though marketing emails rank lower than personal emails in terms of importance, that doesn’t make them unimportant.
If you’re following the tenets of permission marketing and delivering value, then you and the subscriber are on the same side. There’s a reason they signed up. Consider:
- In Merkle’s 2009 View from the Inbox, 58% of respondents thought “email is a great way for companies to stay in touch” and half had made a purchase in the last 12 month after receiving such email
- The recent survey by the CMO Council and InfoPrint found 43% of respondents listed email as a preferred method to get product or service promotions, with 40% claiming to always open promotional offers (not sure many senders would agree with that stat, though!)
- ExactTarget’s detailed 2009 Channel Preference Study found a clear preference for commercial messages to arrive via email
However…
The preference for email isn’t all good news
A preference for email as the channel for receiving commercial messages is generally interpreted as a good thing for (email) marketers. But it comes with its own challenge.
At least some people prefer email for commercial messages because they can more easily triage incoming email or filter it away unseen.
We know this because many people have more than one email account, with different accounts serving different purposes.
- The MAAWG consumer survey revealed that 44% of respondents had both work and home email addresses
- 23% of those MAAWG respondents kept a separate address either for family and friends or for “spam”
- In the Epsilon Global Consumer Email Study, many respondents used separate email accounts as an anti-spam strategy: 43% of respondents in North America said they used a special email address when giving out personal information and 40% did the same for purchases
- ContactLab’s Email Marketing Consumer Report found over 60% of respondents had at least two email addresses, with 63% of these saying they use different accounts for different purposes.
- In the same survey, 29% even say they use special email accounts to receive emails that are of little or no interest
- …and “only” 65% of end users subscribe to newsletters using their main address
For more on this issue and how to deal with it, see the previous post on Getting the right email address.
Make use of transactional email
Not all commercial email is created equal, of course. The MAAWG study, for example, found that receipts and shipping details were ranked almost as important as email from friends and family.
Merkle’s View from the Inbox confirms this. When asked which kind of email program was most worth reading, 41% of respondents said transaction confirmations, beating account summaries into second place (18%). And 68% were open to “additional marketing and promotional messages within transactional and account status emails.”
The danger, of course, is to allow marketing goals to trump informational. If you turn transactional messages into marketing ones, then they lose the value that made them attractive in the first place.