Consumers Want Commercial E-Mail that Gives Value, Finds Return Path Holiday Survey
Wednesday, 24 January 2007
What kind of commercial e-mail do consumers want? According to Return Path’s Third Annual Holiday E-Mail Consumer Survey, consumers – for the third consecutive year – said they appreciate the kind of e-mail that helps them shop, gives them new ideas, and comes when it was promised (and not more often).
The good news is that nearly all respondents selected at least one response indicating the importance of e-mail to their online shopping this season. In fact, half (49.1 percent) claimed they took advantage of several e-mail offers this year.
But the bad news, at least for some marketers, is that half of the respondents report receiving high volumes of "junk" e-mail this year (i.e., “e-mail from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me.”). Also, a third of the respondents said marketers e-mail them more frequently than promised.
What makes consumers open one e-mail and not another?
For the third year in a row, the top reason was "prior value with the e-mail program." This was the only influencing element to grow in importance, up 7 percent from last year to 51.2 percent.
Brand, subject line, and discounts/free shipping also help, but the influence of these elements diminished this year.
Consumers consistently responded that if they found value in a previous e-mail, they were more likely to open the next e-mail from that sender. While marketers have benefited from consumers' love affair with e-mail, the bar keeps moving higher. According to Return Path, this is a relationship medium – the relevancy of today's e-mail counts when consumers consider tomorrow's.
Return Path also reported that consumers are also much savvier than ever when it comes to managing their inbox during the busy holiday season. They are paying attention to things like a working unsubscribe, frequency and the “from” line.
In terms of how consumers deal with extra holiday e-mail, more than half (54.5 percent) of respondents say they just delete unwanted or uninteresting messages unread, a quarter of them unsubscribe and another 26.6 percent click the "this is spam" button. While fewer respondents selected those measures this year than last year, many more (31.3 percent, up 40 percent from last year) selected "there was no impact on my regular habits" category.
Before marketers celebrate these findings, Return Path cautioned them to consider that "regular habits" are not so favorable to marketers who don't work hard to create relevant experiences throughout the year.
A quarter (26 percent) of subscribers routinely report as spam any message they do not recall requesting. Half (51.1 percent) just delete any message they don’t recognize.
This year the increase in holiday season e-mail didn’t change consumer habits around deciding which e-mails to open and read – consumers are already savvy about selecting only those e-mails that they expect and find relevant.
Still, according to Return Path, there is lots of good news around e-mail – it works! The ROI from the holiday season and all year with Return Path clients is again very high from this channel.
Return Path anticipates some exciting multichannel success stories using e-mail in tandem with postal, in-store, and online advertising will be coming out of Q4 2006.
But the spoils of this medium will increasingly go only to those marketers who consistently create compelling subscriber experiences.