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Mar 17, 2009
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New Chart: The Real Culprit Behind Unsubscribes

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SUMMARY: This week’s chart comes to you from MarketingSherpa’s email summit, happening today in Miami. In the opening session, we spent some time looking at the challenges facing email marketing. Year after year in our email benchmark survey, the top challenge is identified as ‘Inbox clutter’ and its effect on all email communications. “Delivering on the promise of relevance to our list” comes in a distant second (17% compared to 36% for clutter). So, marketers seem to agree, but are they right?
Inbox Clutter Isn’t the Problem

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The chart above paints a different picture. The top two answers both speak to the importance of the individual relationship between emailer and recipient. They identify relevance and campaign-level frequency as the top reasons for opting-out or simply ignoring a sender’s email. Only when we get to the third most popular response do we see overall frequency as the culprit.

The bottom line is that people are able to observe and process an immense amount of content on a daily basis. They’re able to identify relevant quality content regardless of the white noise surrounding it. Don’t let the myth of email clutter lull your organization into a belief that a decline in email efficacy is beyond your control.

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Comments about this Article

Mar 23, 2009 - James Carter of Path Marketing Inc. says:
Why do survey response categories total 169%? Thanks!


Mar 23, 2009 - Stefan Tornquist of Sherpa says:
Respondents were allowed to cite multiple reasons, and were quite possibly referring to multiple events, so the total excedes 100%.



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