Delete, unsubscribe or mark as spam?
Web design gets close to all aspects of marketing when you go further in the application. One of these aspects is marketing and a by product of it is email marketing. Email marketing allows you to keep in constant contact with your prospects, remind yourself to clients or communicate more and more on your product and field of expertise, among other benefits. I’ve been going through some mailing reports these last days and something weird caugnt my attention. How are the people I’m communicating to reacting to the emails when not interested?
Mission: delivery !
If you follow the exact directives of good email marketing, the leader being the Email Standards Project, you would surely build a general webmail/mail app compliant email that would get swiftly delivered and would boost your stats on that aspect. You are then supposed to be able to monitor your mail through the number of opened mails and clics.
To read or not to read… ?
This is where things go fast, your contact will either read your mail and go through the process or not. Afterwards, several solutions are available. According to my stats, the easiest solution the better (on the user’s point of view)! You get marked as spam whenever the person gets fed up with your email. It might not be on the first mail but with time people have forgotten the existence of the “unsubscribe” link.
How?
Deleting is easy. If you have an informational mass mail, people will read then either delete or archive the mail. The question remaining is “what triggers the use/abuse of the “mark as spam” button? First the “mark as spam” button gets more and more prominent and easier to access to. In Gmail for example it is even positioned before the delete button. People know that this button will stop your email from ever coming back to their inbox. This therefore cuts the direct use of the unsubscribe button which would have the same result but we are now going towards the “Google mode” of using search engines… everything at hand that requires the lesser effort.
Why?
Because most of the tools used are mostly developed for the US market and the USA is the most spammed country in the world with a whopping 19,8% of spam e-mails sent. No wonder the “mark as spam” button gets handy. So this is why you have to be extra careful when doing mass mailing and email marketing.
Category: Business, Design, Management
Spamming is world wide now! Some how they gets your mail address and starts spamming. So, email marketing need to be more creative!
Twitter: kurtavish
Maybe out of subject but I caught a company last week and is now sure it is selling data. How?
I registered to it just to see what is has. Obviously i used a fake name (Well a creole word)
Some days later I start getting emails from different companies saying Hello “the name i used there” and bla bla bla.
In a few words… We can;t even trust companies on the web concerning giving out data even though they are “famous”.
Kurt Avish’s last blog post..10 Ways To Not Become A Good Authority Blogger
Twitter: sachindb
Sorry I forgot to add this link in the post: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/02/0211_spam_countries/index.htm
Hi Designer Kamrul, there are many ways of getting hold of mail addresses now, chain mails form part of that and, as Kurt Avish said, it also comes through with companies shamelessly selling their own databases. As you so truly put it, it is the email marketing’s job to now be more creative.
All this brings me to think of something. How do you readers deal with mass mail received in your inbox? Do you delete, unsubscribe or mark as spam?
wdbm,
obviously… mark as spam. ..unsubscribe
I noticed that there are still lot’s of websites, specially mauritian sites where they still display email address on their pages. Another source of spamming!! I personnally recommend everyone to put their email address in an image format, and if ever they’re using a contact form, don’t forget the captcha part.
Twitter: sachindb
Well, its a bit sad to say this but Mauritian websites still need to catch up with world standards and as some high end designers say: “the exception of a product is in the detail. And this is the type of detail that sucks…