Uk public inundated by 250bn emails a year

Edited by the Marketingservicestalk editorial team Apr 23, 2008

The UK public is being inundated with 250 billion emails every year, according to Forrester Research and StrongMail, an on-premise email marketing software firm.

In addition, a separate survey by email marketing analyst firm Forrester Research found that two-thirds of emails received by the UK public are unrelated to work or personal life and are typically deleted before they are read.

These findings have prompted industry experts to call for tighter self-regulation and control by the firms responsible for much of this unwanted email.

Paul Bates, email marketing expert and UK managing director of StrongMail, said: "The scale of the problem is extremely costly for everyone involved.

"The marketing departments of many UK firms face bills of hundreds of thousands of pounds to send emails that are never read while the general public is wasting millions of hours trolling through and then deleting unwanted messages.

"Left unchecked, the cost of the problem for all involved will simply continue to grow".

The research found that two-thirds of the British public admits to deleting most emails before reading them.

For UK firms whose marketing departments pay specialist email service providers (ESP) on a "per message" basis this is a costly exercise since up to two-thirds of their fees are simply being delivered to the wastebasket as users repeatedly hit the "delete" button.

This is in stark contrast to the fact that one-third of British consumers actually regard email as a great way to find out about new products.

In any other marketing discipline, such a low return on investment would lead to direct policy changes or tactical revisions, yet email marketing continues to follow the same strategy, without looking at changes, such as leveraging event-driven or transactional emails in order to make communications between companies and their customers more personalised.

Event-driven communications occur when both sender and recipient mutually engage at a transactional level.

By integrating relevant marketing messages into these communications, UK firms can deliver far higher levels of value-add to customers, helping email marketing support wider CRM initiatives, reduce churn and increase brand loyalty.

For UK firms that rely heavily on email marketing to drive their business, Bates advises: "UK firms need to put quality before quantity when it comes to sending emails to thousands, or millions, of current or prospective customers.

"At the same time, they need to adopt rigorous processes to clean their email databases so they're not continually paying excessive fees to send emails to a disinterested or disgruntled customer base.

"Ironically, in a business where volume has traditionally been regarded as king, less has become very much more".

The statistic of 250 billion emails is extrapolated from data from the Forrester Research report, "E-Mail Marketing Trends" (January 2008).