Limits exist in most natural and artificial processes. We can only stay awake so long before our biological system shuts down. When sleep deprived our mental alertness, physical ability and even immune system suffers. When we drive too fast, we can get a speeding ticket, damage our engine or even hurt or kill ourselves or others. Even our emotions have limits. We can run out of patience, fall out of love and only laugh so much before milk comes out of our nose.
Email marketers face limits every day. You can only send so many messages to someone before they become fatigued (or annoyed.) Your mail server can only process so many emails each minute or hour or day. If you try to go beyond these limits, there will be consequences too. Your recipients will eventually unsubscribe or report your messages as spam. Your mail server will suspend your access for a period of time and your reputation as a sender will suffer, affecting your long term goals.
Fortunately, there are mechanisms in place that make it easy to stay within natural and artificial limits. Our bodies naturally adapt to our need for rest and gas pedals, brakes and cruise control help us to regulate our speed on the road.
Likewise, email marketing software allows you to stagger delivery of your campaigns in line with your mail server capacity and automatically process unsubscribe requests and bounces before your sender reputation suffers.
Limits are in place for a reason. Being as effective as possible within those limits is the key to long term success.
Here are some key findings from Merkle’s View from the Inbox 2008 study.
- 31% of email recipients spend less than 10 minutes per week on marketing emails. 8% spend over 3 hours a week.
- Half of the survey respondents made an online purchase as a result of Permission Email Marketing (PEM), and increase of 3% from last year.
- 53% of recipients don’t mind receiving marketing messages in transactional email if they are relevant to their needs and/or interests. 12% of recipients are open to receive marketing/promotion messages in transactional email simply because they have a relationship with the sender.
- 73% of recipients unsubscribe from emails because they aren’t relevant to them. That’s down 4% from last year.
- 66% of recipients opt-out because the sending frequency is too high.
- 64% of recipients opt-out because they say they didn’t sign up in the first place.
- 63% of recipients opt-out because the emails weren’t what they expected when they signed up.
- 30% unsubscribe because of the poor quality of the emails.
- 27% of those surveyed think that they get a lot less/somewhat less spam today compared to last year.
- 49% of respondents think that they get a lot/somewhat more spam today than a year ago.
For full details of the report, read View from the Inbox 2008 (.pdf)
eROI’s recent The Cradle and The Grave survey looked at current email subscription practices. Here are some of the key findings:
- Only 31 percent of those surveyed use double opt-in during subscriptions
- Most email marketers offer low cost, high impact incentives for subscribing (i.e. access to premium content, etc.)
- 90 percent of email marketers do not do exit interviews with people who unsubscribe (i.e. to find out why they unsubscribed.)
- 30 percent of marketers don’t share opt-in details with other systems (i.e. CRM databases, etc.)
- 65 percent of marketers don’t share opt-out details with other internal systems.
For the full report, read The Cradle and The Grave (.pdf)
