70% Of Email Considered Spam

Doubleclick‘s "Sixth Annual Consumer Email Study," [PDF] released last month, found that people consider that 70% of their email is spam, regardless of whether or nor it actually is spam. People often forget that they’ve subscribed to an email newsletter, and so if they’ve forgotten they actually subscribed, they will naturally consider it unsolicited, and therefore, spam.

That’s a perception problem inherent in email marketing. On a positive note, the study does find that consumers no longer consider spam scary, but merely a nuisance that they’ve learned to deal with.

The study includes some other interesting statistics:

The vast majority of us (90%), send or recieve email several times a day; while 44% of us (myself included) use email constantly–getting and receiving email every 15 minutes or so, in my case.

There’s a lot of clutter: The average consumer gets 361 emails a week, an increase of 17% from 2004.

Most (51%) consumers would like to see email replace telemarketing, 44% would like to see it replace face-to-face sales calls; 41% would like it to eliminate direct mail, a thrid would like to see it replace retail offers and coupons, and 31% would like to use it for ebills and electronic statements.

Email should be a critical part of your ecommerce system.

94% of consumers expect confirmation of orders via email and 90% expect shipping confirmations to appear in their inbox.

74% of email users would find information on a merchant’s return policy useful to get in their marketing emails; 59% would like special offers for products they purchase regularly; 49% would like information about membership rewards programs; 48% would like store locations; 39% would like special offers for related products from the same vendor; 37% would like to recieve sweepstakes or drawing offers; only 19% wanted special offers for related products from partner companies; and only 9% wanted offers to subcribe to other companies’ email programs.