April 25 2008
Comment - Two thirds of emails are deleted before they’re read
Paul Bates of StrongMail passes on some tips to help make your emails the one in three that are kept.
A survey by analysts Forrester Research has found that two-thirds of emails received by the UK public are unrelated to work or personal life and are typically deleted before they are read.
These finding have prompted industry experts to call for tighter self-regulation and control by the firms responsible for much of this unwanted email.
Paul Bates, email marketing expert and UK managing director of StrongMail, said: “The scale of the problem is extremely costly for everyone involved. The marketing departments of many UK firms face bills of hundreds of thousands of pounds to send emails that are never read while the general public is wasting millions of hours trolling through and then deleting unwanted messages. Left unchecked, the cost of the problem for all involved will simply continue to grow.”
The research found that two-thirds of the British public admits to deleting most emails before reading them. For UK firms who’s marketing departments pay specialist email service providers (ESP) on a “per message” basis this is a costly exercise since up to two-thirds of their fees are simply being delivered to the wastebasket as users repeatedly hit their “delete” button. This is in stark contrast to the fact that one-third of British consumers actually regard email as a great way to find out about new products.
In any other marketing discipline, such a low return on investment would lead to direct policy changes or tactical revisions, yet email marketing continues to follow the same strategy, without looking at changes, such as leveraging event-driven or transactional emails in order to make communications between companies and their customers more personalised.
Event-driven communications occur when both sender and recipient mutually engage at a transactional level. By integrating relevant marketing messages into these communications, UK firms can deliver far higher levels of value-add to customers, helping email marketing support wider CRM initiatives, reduce churn and increase brand loyalty.
For UK firms that rely heavily on email marketing to drive their business, Bates advises: “UK firms need to put quality before quantity when it comes to sending emails to thousands, or millions, of current or prospective customers. At the same time, they need to adopt rigorous processes to clean their email databases so they’re not continually paying excessive fees to send emails to a disinterested or disgruntled customer base. Ironically, in a business where volume has traditionally been regarded as king, less has become very much more. ”
