Last week I blogged about email marketing delivery rates. MarketingSherpa reported that 54% of permission emailers are filtered as spammers; that included companies like AOL, Wal-Mart and IBM. (My heart weeps for them.)
It was pretty depressing news for us legitimate email marketers. However, as I was updating my PowerPoint slides for tomorrow’s email marketing seminar, I got to thinking: is it really as bad as it sounds?
Take 1:
Admittedly, it’s frustrating to think that 54% of legitimate emailers can’t get through to subscribers. However, when you compare it to other marketing endeavors, how does it hold up?
- A direct mail campaign is deemed successful if it garners a 2% – 4% response rate.
- Conventional wisdom says that the average consumer doesn’t notice your newspaper or magazine ad until they’ve seen it 7 – 9 times; that means you’re paying for it to show 6 – 8 times without expecting a single response.
- Web banner ads…well, don’t even get me started.
- Viewership and retention of TV ads are so bad that the other day, the Wall St. Journal reported that "Ad Icon P&G Cuts Commitment to TV Commercials." Thank you, TiVo.
We must come to terms that due to spam and spam filters we’re never going to reach 100% of our prospects and customers, even the ones who want our materials.
Email marketing is still a cost-effective method of reaching our target audience. One that should be used in conjunction with a Web site, a business blog, search engine optimization and traditional marketing and advertising.
Take 2:
OK, hold on. Now that I’m reading the actual report–what? You thought I had read the report? Nope, just the short, summary article. As Homer Simpson once said, "I won’t sign anything unless I read it or someone gives me the gist of it."
In any case, once I read the full report I had a completely different take on it.
- 54% refers to the 100 major companies that are permission marketers that were part of this research that received at least one "false positive" for spam…not the percentage of emails that were filtered. In addition, these are large companies and organizations that send out tens if not hundreds of thousands of emails regularly…much more than any small businesses would. By volume alone, they are much more likely to have sent an email that someone reported as spam than you or I. It’s like the economy of scale in reverse. Plus, how long have they been sending emails? Maybe they had questionable practices in the past and pissed someone off who hasn’t forgiven them.
- Pivotal Veracity, the company who did the study, used free email addresses at Yahoo, MSN-Hotmail & Gmail to subscribe to these permission email lists. Although many of our subscribers may have accounts at these services, I would think these huge, free services are more reactionary to spam than other, company-based email addresses due to the larger number of customers who complain about spam. Again, the economy of scale in reverse. By using only Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail accounts it seems that the survey is slightly skewed towards B2C results.
- If an incoming mail ended up in the spam folder, the report counted it as a "false positive," as it should have. However, I wonder if during the signup, if subscribers had been given the "From" address to add to their inbox, if the false-positive number would have gone down.
In conclusion: A more accurate assessment of the report may have been 54% of large companies may have trouble getting their emails through to people using giant, free email services.
Rich Brooks
Small Business Email Marketer
Yesterday I put on our 
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