A Love-Hate Relationship with Email

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

A recent survey by Jupiter Research looked at how people act and feel about opt-in email marketing.

One of their findings? A lot of people don’t trust email publishers — more than two in five think signing up to a list will result in more spam being sent to them. Yikes.

But there’s good news too.

They Love Us, They Love Us Not

Nearly a third of people surveyed “believe the unsubscribe button in e-mail offers does not work.” This echoes the sentiment from a NY Times article we blogged last month, and reinforces the idea that people click the “Spam” button for a lot of reasons.

However, the survey offers a silver lining: almost half of people who opt-in to receive email messages make a purchase from them.

What Does This Say About Email?

Seems strange, doesn’t it? People say they don’t like email marketing, but they apparently like to buy things promoted through it.

Here’s what I take away from findings like this:

Permission-Based Email Marketing Works. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t still be buying products and services via email.

Not All Email is Created Equal. The survey’s findings only appear contradictory because we assume everyone’s receiving the same kind of email campaign. Throw that assumption out and the findings make a lot more sense.
The users who are on well-run lists and the ones who are on poorly-run ones will have different attitudes toward permission-based email.

Trust Is More Important Than Ever

People like email. They’re familiar with email. They want to use it.

But… poor email practices by publishers make it harder for the average email user to see a difference between spamming and opt-in email marketing.

As email publishers, we all have a responsibility to build our subscribers’ trust, to distinguish ourselves from the mass of spammers — intentional and accidental — that are negatively shaping attitudes toward email.

How Do You Build Trust?

Several previous posts touch on ways to build trust:

I encourage you to take a look at those posts, of course. However, I also want to hear your thoughts on this.

What do you to to build subscriber trust? What do you think opt-in email publishers can/should do to improve attitudes toward email?

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Resources:
JupiterResearch - E-Mail Marketing Attitudes and Behavior
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6 Responses

Gidon Ariel
February 13th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

It’s clear that the most important thing in web marketing is the golden rule: don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

Keep that in mind, every thing else falls into place.

Thanks and God Bless
Sue Melin
February 13th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

The man in the post above said it best. Also, let me build upon his comments–I think that what most people are looking for is good, relevant and free information, just like aweber gives it’s subscribers.
All emails have snippets of info, but few have quality content.
Lynn Veach
February 14th, 2007 at 6:51 pm

I agree with the two previous comments. I would add that it is important to let our subscribers know exactly what they will be recieving from us and the frequency of mailings.

I am also finding that it is important to encourage feed-back from our subscribers and developing a rapport.

Thank you Aweber for leading the way!

Lynn Veach
Sabrina O'Malone
February 15th, 2007 at 7:05 am

Justin,

You hit the nail on the head here. There is no "shortcut" to "long term" success. If your email campaigns do not provide significant value to your customers, you will quickly end up reported as spam.

Since my customers are extremely busy mothers who work at home AND on a job; it’s something of a committment whenever they allocate time to read email. With this in mind, I’m aware that every email I send out had better save them time, energy or money. That’s what they were expecting to receive when they subscribed, and I make it a point give the customer what they expect - value.

In the working mom niche, the most successful email campaigns give subscribers the opportunity to pre-test new timesaving checklists, a heads up about a free coupon or coupon code, or offer SOMETHING FOR FREE that makes combining motherhood with employment easier.

In building a positive, professional working relationship and trust with customers, exceed their expectations. Find out what their needs are, meet them as best you can, and do it far better than your competitors. (And if you don’t know the customers needs, don’t be afraid to ASK!)

It’s my opinion that well-written, unique, valuable content will make or break long term success in email marketing campaigns. That’s really all there is to it.

Sincerely,
Sabrina O’Malone
President,
WorkingMom
Ken Ralston
February 24th, 2007 at 2:56 pm

Well, forgive me for being the one to rain on this parade but I agree with the report. Hate far out weighs the love and it’s getting worse. In fact, I think people are starting to insulate themselves from the traditional websites and opt in mailing list by joining the social websites.

Last year seems like I had one or two opt-in’s a day - this year one this month! I’m talking basically the same website with the same highly relevant content. My traffic is also down some but not near that much. Where have they gone?

My guess is we can yet again thank the unscrupulous who do things like sell email addresses of those who unsubscribe. Took me a long time to figure out that is why people hit the spam button on their browser instead of the unsubscribe link. The unsubscribe link can get you automatically signed up to the ’sell email list’ (of course people done know that when they unsubscribe) which I believe just happened to me with a very popular Google Ad Words site.

If you folks are successful with email opt in’s and such, then more power to you but I honestly think that spam has rendered email into an ineffective method of communication because people are literally afraid of it. And maybe rightully so.

I’m considering other options.
Best homes
November 7th, 2007 at 2:27 am

Information from subscription can be really precious to subscriber. I don’t visit all sites i am interested in daily but when i get curious info from my subscription i do. It helps me to miss something useful for me.