Email marketing offers a sustainable solution to traditional print marketing. This practice is focused, measureable and affordable. Working alongside an effective website and a Web 2.0 strategy, email marketing is an essential online tool that endears customers to your brand and measures their interests in your products and services.
A recently released study of consumer (that word again) attitudes towards email and online interaction with businesses found that consumers prefer email as a primary method of communications in their personal and business capacities.
This research covered subjects as varied as security features and email protection, consumer abilities to identify spam, concerns about fraud, preferred modes of communications, online purchases resulting from email communications, email privacy, email unreliability and online marketing practices and reputation management.
Highlights from the study include:
Email’s Vitality
- Sixty-seven percent of respondents prefer email as a communications channel over other online vehicles and 65 percent believe this will continue to be the case in five years.
- Consumer opinion of the future importance of email registered far above future expectations for video conferencing (19 percent), instant messaging (17 percent), SMS text messages (12 percent) and Web meetings (12 percent).
- Sixty-five percent of the demographic between the ages of 18 to 34, the age demographic most comfortable with IM, SMS and emerging communications methods, will favor email to communicate with businesses in five years.
Online Reputation Management Best Practices to Build Trust
- More than 88 percent of respondents said they would like organizations to give them more choices over the content and frequency of the emails they receive, including options on advertisements, special offers, articles, newsletters, white papers and other specific content options.
- More than 80 percent of participants favor doing business with organizations that use opt-in permission to send them email.
- Monthly emails, content and frequency options positively impacted a company’s reputation.
- Three of every four respondents prefer engaging with organizations that exhibit strong privacy practices.
- Only 12 percent of respondents acknowledged making one or more purchases from businesses they did not know.
Online Business Practices to Avoid
- Daily email messages ranked with pop-up advertisements as the most damaging online tactics to a company’s online reputation.
- On average, about 80 percent of respondents are not comfortable with businesses sharing their email address.
- Internet users believe that about two thirds of companies are likely to share their email addresses with third parties.
- More than 80 percent feel that a business’ reputation is negatively affected if it shares customer email addresses with third parties.
Source: Habeus
