A significant percentage of consumers noted a surge in promotional e-mail in their inboxes this year and considered much of it to be “junk,” according to a study by e-mail delivery firm Return Path.
Almost one in four, or 24.1%, of consumers surveyed by Return Path said they received much more but a manageable amount of e-mail each day during the 2007 holiday shopping season compared to the previous year. Another 13% said they received so much more, it was overwhelming, according to Return Path.
At the same time, more than half of respondents, or 56.4%, said they receive a lot of “junk” from marketers, defined as “e-mail from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me.”
Also, a significant percentage of those surveyed for the 2007 report, or 36.2%, said they received more e-mail than they expected based on the information they were given at signup, according to Return Path. This is down slightly compared to 37.4% in 2006 and 43.5% in 2005.
“Many marketers who send more e-mail than promised end up with a short-term gain,” the company said in its analysis of the findings. “However, all of them also see a long-term degradation of the file, which has to be made up by recruiting new subscribers to the file who don’t know yet they will be tricked.”
An alarming percentage of consumers surveyed by Return Path, or 22.3%, said they handled the increase of e-mails this holiday season by reporting the sender as a spammer to their ISPs. However, this figure is down from 26.6% in 2006 and 33.6% in 2005.
Still, 13.9% said they typically use the “report spam” button when they no longer want e-mail from a company, while a healthy 26.2% said they use the marketer’s unsubscribe button.
Also, 45.6% said they simply deleted the additional e-mails and 41% said the increase had no impact on their regular e-mail habits, according to Return Path.
Moreover, 24.8% said they simply unsubscribed from the excess e-mails in 2007, compared to 24.1% in 2006 and 30.5% in 2005, according to Return Path.
In other findings, 59.1% respondents to Return Path’s annual survey once again cited knowing and trusting the sender as a primary reason they’ll open an e-mail, making it the No. 1 influencer.
The No. 2 reason for opening an e-mail was having found a previous message from the sender valuable, according to 45.8% of respondents to Return Path’s survey.
Just over 45% cited the subject line as a primary reason for opening an e-mail, making it the No. 3 reason.
Also, just over 20% said they’d opened e-mails because of a free-shipping offer, and 23.1% cited discounts as a reason to open, according to Return Path.
“Subscribers are telling us it’s OK to be direct marketers again,” said Return Path in its analysis.
On a disappointing note, just 29.1% of respondents said they took advantage of e-mail offers this holiday season, down from 49.1% in 2006 and 50.2% in 2005, according to Return Path.
However, 92% of respondents said commercial e-mail had some sort of impact on their holiday shopping habits, including 24.1% who said they used e-mail for comparison shopping, 20.3% who said they used e-mail as a guide but already knew their favorite sites, 18.9% who said they used e-mail for gift ideas, and 15.1% said they used e-mail when visiting the sender’s store.
