Customer Experience Management strategies Web-Synergies-Insights
November 29, 2012 03:30 PM

The SPAM Challenge

It’s not a statistic to be proud of but a recent report from Sophos found that India is spewing more spam than ever before.  While the country is home to 5.3% of the world’s internet users, the globe’s third most connected country, it is passing along a staggering 16.1% of all spam. Asia overall accounts for 48.7% of spam relaying. Nearly half of worldwide email users come from the Asia Pacific region.

This clearly presents a challenge to Indian business marketers who have signaled their intent to increase their budget allocations for email and SMS marketing in the year ahead. Octane.in found that 63% of their respondents planned to increase their budgets up to 10% in the upcoming year and the highest proportion of these (20%) believed that stopping their emails from being directly routed into a junk folder was their biggest challenge.

32% of Indian marketers believe that a strong anti-spam law like the CAN-SPAM (USA) with heavy fines and jail sentences would act as a suitable deterrent to negate the menace of spam in India.

websyng_india_email_info

The Indian situation also needs to be considered in a world context.  When you remember that the first email was sent in 1971 note also that a typical company of 300 employees in today’s business environment has 350 email accounts and receives 392,000 emails per month.  They also block 1.3 million spam message filters and viruses per month.

According to data from IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Centre Spam represented 70% of email traffic in 2011 and the figure was around 68% in February of this year.

Will the situation improve?  Certainly, spam filtering is a far sophisticated art than it once was but the sheer volume of email is also rising exponentially.

The Radicati Group’s research estimates that the total number of worldwide email accounts will increase from 3.3 billion accounts this year to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016; an average annual growth rate of 6% over the next four years.  Instant Messaging (IM)  accounts are also predicted to increase in a similar fashion from 2.7 billion in 2012 to 3.4 billion by year-end 2016.

The email should be considered as a ‘social channel’ as the marketing intent and the behavior it tries to produce can be compared to social channels such as Facebook.

So what measures should you be taking to ensure your email gets through?  Here are six tips:

  1. You need to use a system that allows you to track your email campaigns and evaluate fully the success, or partial success of each. How many people clicked through on the stories you thought were important? How many people unsubscribed?
  2. Content is king!  You need to have strongly used-focused and interesting items in your email.  Overtly advertising content will turn people off and see your email quickly dispatched to the Junk folder.
  3. Email at regular intervals but not too often.  Coordinate mailing within the company.  You do not want several people from your enterprise sending emails to the same database of subscribers.
  4. Provide innovative/original Calls to Action for each article. Make sure there are appropriate (relevant) links included.
  5. Less is more.  It is better to have fewer topics covered than many peripheral ones.  Make sure at least one topic is ‘human interest’ i.e. people stories rather than product pitches.
  6. Ensure that you give your readers the ability to share your content with others.

If you are looking for a good option to implement the six components of this email strategy then consider using news builder Pro.  For inquiries about this solution contact us here.

Related Stories