madcomments

I am a member of the DMA’s email marketing council, which produced the report you refer to and run a digital marketing agency with a 100% focus on email; like you I suffer from inbox overload so I do sympathise with the sentiments you express.

However it is important to point out that legitimate email marketers are forbidden by law to send unsolicited email to consumers and so the DMA could not and would not exhort its members to “blitz” you or anyone else’s inbox. Au contraire, the email marketing channel is unique in the sense that you can only send an email to a consumer if they are deemed to have ordinarily transacted with you or specifically asked to receive information from you. Once on your list anyone can, backed by law, very quickly and easily ask to be removed from your mailing list. Sensible email practitioners are therefore very careful not to abuse the customers and prospects on their lists.

I would also like debunk the myth that inbox overload is caused by email marketers. As you know 90% of all email traffic is spam and illegal. Of the legal emails you or I might receive most of them will be work related, from colleagues and contacts (including people who hit the reply all button), we also subscribe to our competitors emails and industry specific newsletters. Being young, email and technology savvy, we are probably also getting lots of pokes and other twitter from social and business networking sites like Facebook or Linked-in. So what contribution to the load on your inbox do email marketers make?

Research from the US and anecdotal evidence here in the UK suggests that the average person is subscribed to around 15 non work related lists. Email marketers typically average 2 messages a month, if you exclude daily emails, typically from jobsites or newsfeeds and transactional messages. Very few companies send more than 4 email messages a month.

So for the average consumer signed up to 15 lists that makes a total of around 30 commercial or marketing messages per month, which equates to an average of one a day - which is hardly overload!

The point I want to make is that apart from spam, which is a serious problem indeed, most of our pain is caused by our jobs and lifestyles and not by DMA members or my clients. They just happen to be in the firing line for the spam backlash.

Dela, thanks for your considered and admittedly convincing response. A quick glance at my inbox this morning does at first appear to support your view that most unwanted mail is spam not legitimate marketing.

But wait a minute, there’s an email from a company I once contacted about one particularly item, now they’re hitting me with a range of unrelated product launches, and have been doing so for months. Here’s another (have resisted the temptation of naming specific brands), it’s from a shop I once went to and randomly entered a prize draw to win something suitably fabulous. I never asked to be kept informed of their latest sales seasons did I?

Another email is from the parent company of a particular music brand I’m interested in – but once again, details of these unrelated books really hold no interest to me.

I guess my question is, where is the line between corporate e-marketing which you encourage, and spam, which you rightly recognise as a “serious problem indeed”? Although I’m sure you have an official definition at your fingertips I hope you can cede the point that in reality the boundaries are still very fuzzy, even in the most ethical of companies.

You make the interesting point that the average consumer signing-up to around 30 commercial or marketing messages per month is “hardly overload”, which again sounds suspiciously like encouraging marketers, albeit responsibly, to further utilise the medium.

In short, I suspect if DMA members acting on the study and following your advice will ultimate equate to more emails being targeted at me - the general consumer.