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StrongMail Research Reveals UK Public Inundated by 250 Billion Emails Per Year
LONDON, April 21, 2008 – The UK public is annually inundated with 250 billion* emails, according to statistics compiled by StrongMail, an on-premise email marketing software firm. In addition, analyst firm Forrester Research found 2/3 of emails received by the UK public are unrelated to work or personal life and are deleted before they are read.
These finding have prompted industry experts to call for tighter self-regulation and control by the firms responsible for much of this unwanted email.
Paul Bates, UK managing director of StrongMail: “The scale of the problem is costly for everyone. UK Marketing departments face bills of £100,000’s to send emails that are never read, while the public is wasting millions of hours trolling through and deleting them.”
The research found 2/3 of the British public delete most emails before reading them. For UK firms whose marketing departments pay email service providers on a “per message” basis, this is a costly exercise. In any other marketing discipline, such a low return on investment would lead to policy changes or revisions, yet email marketing continues to follow the same strategy, without looking at changes, such as leveraging event-driven or transactional emails to create more personalised communications.
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: “Put quality before quantity when sending emails to thousands, or millions, of current or prospective customers. At the same time, adopt rigorous processes to clean email databases so you’re not 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).
About StrongMail Systems, Inc.
StrongMail Systems provides businesses with commercial-grade, on-premise solutions for marketing and transactional email. StrongMail integrates its proven email delivery, tracking and campaign management software on high-performance servers that are optimized for maximum deliverability. In addition to providing superior control, security and integration capabilities, StrongMail's in-house approach offers companies a more powerful and cost-effective alternative to homegrown or outsourced solutions. Hundreds of companies worldwide rely on StrongMail's solutions to power their mission-critical customer communications. A Silicon Valley company, StrongMail is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, and is funded by Sequoia Capital, Evercore Partners, Globespan Capital Partners and DAG Ventures. To learn more about StrongMail Systems, visit www.strongmail.com.
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