Marketing Studies

Yes, you've read the title correctly. According to some recent reports both spam and delivery are on the rise.

On one hand, ClickZ shares research results from a study by Postini, which discovered that spam volume in March grew 10% in comparison to March 2004, and is expected to reach 92% altogether by the end of 2005.

At least end-users are getting in to the flow with spam, as reported by a Pew study, which found that end-users are getting used to spam and it's bothering them less than it used to.

However, on the other hand, Internet Retailer (via MarketingVox) reports that retail and catalog marketers saw an overall delivery rate of 94% in Q4 2004, based on stats from Bigfoot Interactive Inc. It looks close to an all-time high for e-mail marketing ...

Good news for e-mail marketers?

Not neccessarily. Overall deliverability is defined as total e-mails minus all failures ... but the failures themselves contain only the e-mail returned to the sender, and not the actual messages that were stopped somewhere on the delivery route by various filters without actually being sent back.

Consequently, this does not actually mean that more e-mail is being delivered, but simply that less e-mail is being returned, which is by no means the same.

According to DoubleClick, 64.7% of all legitimate e-mail being sent (based on their own customers' stats) is never opened. That still leaves us with 35.3% actually being opened, but how much of that is then read?

But on a more positive note, Bigfoot Interactive did see clickghrough rates increase from 3.8% to 4.8%, which they atribute to better-crafted and timed promotional messages. So e-mail marketers are getting better ...