In a survey conducted in February 2012 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about 60% of US email users ages 18 to 64 said they had used email the day before. Daily email use is even higher among mobile phone users. Email technology provider Return Path found 88% of mobile phone users checked their email via a handheld device daily (eMarketer 2013).
Not only that, customer acquisition via email has quadrupled over the last four years (Custora 2013). Custora also points out that email remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The CLV – Customer Lifetime Value of customers acquired through email is much higher than social media too.
That guarantees a still-growing market for email marketing. However, that also brings more spam.
What is a spam?
Basically, electronic spamming is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited messages (spam), especially advertising (Wikipedia 2014). The most seen forms of spam are email and SMS. So, the marketers got your email or telephone number somewhere on the Internet, and started sending offers to you. Some marketers defend themselves by saying they only send once. Please remember it doesn’t matter if it is once or multiple times. They are already annoying the receivers, you!
The numbers
Our antispam clusters show the increasing of spam recently, especially in December. Here is the rate from the 4th quarter of 2014.
Obviously, it is the sales period, and the marketers want to throw their deals to consumers as much as possible, despite it is spam or not. The bigger risk is that if someone wants to attack you by sending a virus or a phishing message via those offers.
In February this year, (Symantec) also released a report for December 2013 to February 2014 showing that the average spam rate in those months were around 64% globally. Two of three sent messages are spam!
What to do?
Nothing wrong with sending good offers to customers, current or potential ones. We just highly recommend the marketers to use email marketing effectively and correctly. Stop spam email marketing to people who are not subscribed to your list.
For receivers, each business can protect yourself by having an antispam filter before you receive tons of offers into your inbox. It is doable. In case you have any doubt, feel free to drop us a message with your concern, we shall be glad to help.
References:
Custora (2013). E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot
eMarketer (2013). Email Marketing Benchmarks: Key Data, Trends and Metrics.
Symantec (2014). Symantec intelligence report.
Wikipedia. (2014). “Spamming.” Retrieved 12, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming