Spam Blamed For Loss of Email Revenue

Ad executives blame aggressive spam filters for sending legitimate marketing emails to bulk folders or blocking them from recipients. Mistakenly reporting emails as spam is also slowing revenue from email marketing.

37% of consumers admit to using the “spam”, “junk” or “bulk” button as an unsubscription tool, and 79% admit using those buttons to get rid of excess email. When messages are reported as spam, ISPs can classify the sender as a spammer and won’t deliver future emails from that company.

Syd Jones, senior manager of worldwide demand generation and emarketing for IBM said (via MediaPost) that some employee groups refuse to enter email addresses into company mail databases because they are afraid someone else within the company will send spam to that inbox. "We are our own worst enemies in terms of our different groups thinking they own the individual e-mail contact," he said.

What is a legitimate email marketer to do? By proactively culling dropped subscribers, by targeting the messages to appeal to the subscriber list and by increasing your own “rating” through services such as SenderScore.org.

Tags: email, email deliverability, email filtering, email marketing