Richard Gibson's DMA post of March 11 focussed on a new whitepaper from Emailcenter that surveys the attitudes of consumers of email marketing. The Consumer Views on Email survey comes just a couple of weeks before the release of Hitting the Mark 2009 – dotMailer's annual major benchmark study of the use of  email marketing by top high street brands.

Hitting the Mark 2009 uses dotMailer's established Email Effectiveness Matrix to analyse the email campaigns of over 40 major high street brands. Together, these reports make for synergistic reading.

The Consumer Views survey showed that lack of relevance was a key issue for email recipients, who are receiving too many emails of no interest or relevance to them.

Hitting the Mark 2009 reveals the reasons for this source of consumer frustration:

72% of emails surveyed did not have a personalised salutation and a further 10% had poor personalisation, containing errors. What's more, 70% of the retailers in the survey didn't collect any demographic or relevant personal data at the point of email signup, that would have helped them begin segmenting and sending targeted and relevant messages from the outset.

The lack of focus on segmentation and personalisation means retailers are missing out on critical opportunities to increase the relevance of their emails to their recipients, and so increase their response rates.

The Consumer Views survey also found that marketers are abusing the trust of their customers by over mailing, with 14% of recipients using the Spam button to unsubsubscribe.

Again, Hitting the Mark 2009 throws light on this issue. Over 25% of the retailers in the report complicated their unsubscribe process by requiring more from the recipient than a single click through. And only one of the retailers placed their unsubscribe link at the top of the email – the most prominent position.

Marketers who make it easy and straightforward for a recipient to unsubscribe are helping to build trust and avoiding the danger of ISP complaints and deliverability issues.

By taking simple and straightforward steps, marketers can tackle head-on, 2 of the key issues that negatively impact email marketing recipients, and ensure the budget they invest in email really hits the mark.

To download a copy of Hitting the Mark, click here.

Tink Taylor – dotMailer