I sat down to read my Interactive Marketing Guide 2008 put out by B to B last night, and found some very interesting statistics that will impact the way I plan my business for the future.
How business owners view email
- 64% view email on their BlackBerrys or other mobile devices.
- 69% users at work view their email in preview panes.
- 59% of online consumers block images in email.
How business owners view spam
- 79% of email recipients said that if they don’t recognize a sender, they sometimes mark messages as spam.
- 20% said they use a spam button as a way to unsubscribe from messages or newsletters they’ve signed up for in the past.
What this means to you and me is we really need to be careful about the amount of email we’re sending out to the people on our list.
Because your recipients are just as likely to hit the spam button as they are the delete button, you could soon be disallowed from sending to certain servers. Does email need more refinement as a marketing tool? Definitely. But for now, we have to work within the systems.
One way is to blog, and begin relying more heavily on RSS feeds. Your customers can sign up for your feed directly to their favorite reader, and read you as time permits. It does have positives and negatives, but it is a viable solution.
Or maybe combine the two – I work my blog and my newsletter together in every issue.
If you don’t have a blog, maybe its time to have one custom designed for you. I love blogging (I have several custom blogs that I maintain) and would highly recommend you find out more about blogs.
