View from the Inbox - E-Mail Marketing Trends Study

Merkle released its annual e-mail marketing 'View from the Inbox’™ study. This study measures and tracks attitudes and behaviors toward permission-based e-mail among U.S. consumers and points to several trends in consumers’ attitudes and use of permission-based e-mail marketing:

• Consumers feel in control: Most consumers (88%) feel mostly or completely in control of their inboxes – up nine points from 2004.
• General attitudes toward corporate e-mail are positive: More people (58%) believe e-mail is a great way for companies to stay in touch – up from 45% three years ago.
• E-mail is effective: Half of the respondents made an online purchase in the previous year as a result of permission-based marketing – up 3 percentage points from one year ago.
• E-mail can influence decisioning: Half of respondents reported that a company that does a good job with e-mail influenced their decision to do business – up 6% points from last year. However, e-mail can also close doors:About one-third (32%) have stoppeddoing business with at least one company as a result of poor e-mail marketing practices.
• Relevancy is in the eye of the beholder: Consumers (41%) consider transaction confirmation emails to be most relevant, followed by account summary emails (18%).

The report is available for download here.

Comments

[Courtney]

Thanks for the great post Tamara. There certainly are some interesting stats here. One that especially jumps out is "About one-third (32%) have stoppeddoing business with at least one company as a result of poor e-mail marketing practices."
I think everyone who conducts email marketing campaigns should look seriously at this particular statistic as I think it could definitely have adverse effects for some.

[Kurt Johansen]

For an email campaign to be successful two very important pieces must be in place. 1. The software chosen should be easy, reliable, be used in a HTML and Text vesrion and have ready customised templates to use. Spam checks and how the email will look in browsers are also essential. As well as open, clickthrough stats, autoresponder sequences are crucial. 2. The strategy behind your campaign must be also be rock solid. What are you trying to accomplish, the methods to get there and how will you know you have arrived.