How many unread emails do you have in your in-box and what was your reason for ignoring them? Has your mother been emailing about how you don’t call enough? Are you ignoring online bills? Are you being solicited by men who need you to wire them $100,000 because they have been unjustly exiled from their home country?
Many recipients either unsubscribe or simply stop reading emails from online marketers. Year-after-year, in-box clutter has been the number one reason people resist emails, but this year, things have been turned on their head. A 2008 study from Marketingsherpa’s email summit in Miami has determined that in-box clutter is not the biggest problem – the problem is relevance.
58% of those surveyed said the number one reason they opted out of or unsubscribed from an email was because the email was not relevant to them; 44% said it was because they received too many emails from a particular sender; and only 31% said it was because of in-box clutter.
Good News For Email Marketers
It is good news that relevance is the reason people are opting out of emails, because unlike in-box clutter, this is something we as email marketers can control. It is more important than ever for your campaigns’ to immediately strike a chord with your customers. Marketers need to identify the absolute best products/offers they can send out. Copy and design need to work seamlessly together from subject headline to layout to entice customers to open.
The chart plays an optimistic beat for online marketing – it asserts that you are in control of the effectiveness your emails have on your customers. There will always be recipients who opt out, but good online marketing practices can limit and decrease these numbers.
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