Articles Worth Reading: Too much and not enough

Retailers are sending more marketing e-mails as customers grow weary; and many retailers are not testing, possibly missing profits

From Internet Retailer
By Bill Siwicki

U.S. retailers and wholesalers will send 158 billion marketing e-mails this year, a number likely to grow 63% to 258 billion in 2013, Forrester Research Inc. predicts. At the same time, consumers are growing weary of the number of marketing e-mails they receive: 77% of online consumers say they receive too many, Forrester says.

This should be a clear warning to retailers: Don’t inundate customers with e-mails. But nearly half of retailers are not paying heed and pushing forward with more, according to the latest Internet Retailer survey. 48.9% of respondents to the survey have increased the number of monthly e-mail campaigns they send.

“Retailers are trying to keep up with the competition—and as the competition sends out more e-mails, they send out more e-mails,” says Julie M. Katz, an analyst who specializes in e-mail marketing at Forrester Research. “Marketers feel like if they do not send an e-mail out on a Tuesday but their competitors do, they are missing out on business. So now they feel they need to send an e-mail out every day of the week to touch their customers before their competitors do.

”According to Internet Retailer’s survey of 174 web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers, 55.7% send 1 to 3 e-mail marketing campaigns every month. 20.7% send 4 to 5, 12.1% send 6 to 8, 5.7% send 9 to 10, 3.4% send 11 to 15, 0.6% send 16 to 20 and 1.7% send more than 20.“Sending more e-mail is going to backfire. Consumers are annoyed with the volume of e-mail messages they receive, and they’re starting to move to other communications channels,” Katz says. “In 2007, 90% of U.S. adults used e-mail at least weekly; this year so far, the number is down to 83%. These people are turning to text messaging and messaging within social networks to communicate; as a result, they are not seeing marketing e-mails as much.”

Find out "the cure" by reading on at Internet Retailer!