EMAIL has been used to deliver business communications and marketing messages for a number of years now. The amount of email marketing messages continues to grow, notwithstanding the effect of the anti-spam legislation that came into effect in Australia on April 11, 2004.
Email marketers, or those using an email component to their campaigns that ensured only opt-in subscriptions were used, still saw the numbers of email messages delivered continue to grow steadily. The Australian operation of high-volume multimedia messaging solutions house Xpedite now delivers twice as many messages every day than it did this time last year, with June 2004 being a record-breaking month with over 4.2 million email messages successfully delivered.
This increase in traffic demonstrates that opt-in subscription-based communication is actually growing the market. This trend is also backed up by data from a recent Forrester report. Forrester looked at email consumption in private homes and concluded that almost 80% of consumers have opted in to receive some sort of email marketing communication or product information from companies they trusted.
Open and click-through rates have remained constant over the past year despite the exponential rise of spam that threatened to devalue the medium and consumers’ interaction with it. This is very encouraging as now most households cite that at least two thirds of the email received in their inbox is unsolicited and poorly targeted.
In terms of volume, email traffic will continue to grow, especially as people get more comfortable with opt-in communications and are given the choice to opt out, and as the Australian Communications Authority begins to bring the serial spammers under control.
Through opt-in campaigns, there are growing levels of sophistication in segmentation, targeting and positive responses. Marketers now have a better understanding of the medium and, instead of using email as a cheap mass medium, are better focusing on the offer and the target.
This in turn is starting to deliver better results as tools can be deployed very inexpensively to track results and understand ROI right down to the dollar.
Stephane Gervois is marketing communications manager for Xpedite Australia & New Zealand.
