This eMarketer article is troubling for anyone who does email marketing. It reports that nearly 34% of people receiving marketing email during the holiday season reported that mail as being spam.

People subscribe to lists and forget about it. People make purchases, but don’t opt out of the “we’ll share your info with third parties” condition. People don’t read privacy policies, detailing how their information is going to be shared. Clicking that “Report Spam” button is as easy as clicking “Delete,” but it sets off a very different chain reaction.

My guess is that the vast majority of what’s reported as spam is in fact legitimate and legal email marketing (and I’m talking in the broad, best-practice sense, not the sleazy and technical sense). Yet, companies who are trying to do the right thing are spending more and more time dealing with time-consuming spam complaints (ever have to deal with a string of Spamcop emails?) and ISP blacklisting issues.

Just a cost of doing business? For now, yes. A major contributor to the erosion of the effectiveness of email marketing? We’ll see.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 9:45 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff.