So you’ve been a good little marketer. You don’t purchase or rent emails. You target opt-in only folks for your promotional emails. But your conversion rates could be better. There aren’t as many clickthroughs.
What’s going on? A couple of months ago, we pointed out a problem of recipients trashing newsletters that they signed up for into the spam bin. A recent MarketingSherpas report produces a survey of emailers who use AOL, Yahoo, and MSN who have recently sent their messages to the junk folder. The question was straightforward and reasonable: “Why did you mark the emails as spam?”
The responses will not please many email marketers.
More than half of the respondents reported a legitimate reason: it was spam, after all. The traditional definition of spam is “unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). But take a look at the other reasons. “Email received was not of interest” was the second most common response. And “I receive too much email from the sender” came in at third place.
What does this mean? Can spam be now defined as any message that’s uninteresting or annoyingly frequent? Apparently, it seems so. Although these results may be somewhat disturbing, they should only reinforce what you should have been doing this whole time: delivering relevant and timely promotional messages.
Judging from the survey results, it’s still important to give compelling messages with great promotions or topics of interest. Also, bombing your mailing list with too many emails is a no-no. Yes, you could argue that it’s wrong for web users to mark solicited email as junk or spam, but they probably do not realize the consequences on the sender. While you can’t control what your mailing list does, you can work on your own messages to make sure that they deliver what your sign-up call-to-action promised: great deals, interesting news and info, and exclusive features!
To read about the best practices in email marketing, refer to our original email marketing checklist.
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