Period Three Blog » Newsletters and Spam

Jun042008

Newsletters and Spam

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The Neilson/Normal Group released a report on email newsletters, they reviewed just about every aspect of email newsletters and how we use them as marketers and recipients alike. One thing they did have to say is that you should keep it brief (people scan not read in detail) and only send one when you have something to say. The big detractor is Spam in the wild. Here’s what they had to say:

There’s a little good news (but mostly bad news) about the impact of spam on email newsletters. The good news is that users in our recent studies were better able to differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages than they could in the past. In our earlier newsletter usability studies, users sometimes confused the two. Now, spam has a very prominent profile in terms of popular awareness, press coverage, and the sheer amount of it hitting inboxes. Users have thus developed a reasonable understanding of the spam phenomenon as opposed to simply being baffled about unexpected messages.

The bad news is that the increased burden on email users has caused people to become even more stressed and impatient when processing their inbox. Users have less tolerance for newsletters that waste their time.

We have also found that people often use their spam filters as a shortcut to eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam. Voila, that newsletter no longer shows up in the inbox.
The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus be undeliverable to other subscribers who still welcome new issues. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.

So, before you just “blast” out that next newsletter, make sure it has relevant, timely content and make sure it works (test it)…

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Newsletters and Spam

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