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Extrapolating data from the January 2008 Forrester Research (News - Alert) report titled "E-Mail Marketing Trends," StrongMail, an on-premise e-mail marketing software firm, has deduced that the British public is annually inundated with 250 billion e-mails.

 

Forrester also found that a good 60 percent-plus of e-mails received by the British public are unrelated to work or personal life and are deleted before they are read.

 

These finding have prompted some in the industry to call for tighter self-regulation and control by the firms responsible for the unwanted e-mail, StrongMail officials say.

 

Paul Bates, UK managing director of StrongMail, says the scale of the problem is "costly for everyone. UK Marketing departments face bills of £100,000's to send e-mails that are never read, while the public is wasting millions of hours trolling through and deleting them."

 

The research found two-thirds of the British public deletes most e-mails before reading them. For UK firms who's marketing departments pay e-mail service providers on a "per message" basis, this is a costly exercise, StrongMail officials said.

 

"In any other marketing discipline, such a low return on investment would lead to policy changes or revisions;" they say, yet e-mail marketing "continues to follow the same strategy, without looking at changes, such as using event-driven or transactional e-mails to create more personalized communications."

 

Interestingly, according to a recent study conducted by Microsoft (News - Alert) Canada, Canadians say the lack of emotion in e-mails frequently causes conversations to be misinterpreted.

 

While more than one-quarter of Canadians say they use e-mail to conduct business, 32 percent say they have had an e-mail misinterpreted, and 66 percent say they need to spend time explaining the context or tone of a message to a colleague after sending.

 

Canadians spend at least 30 minutes a day re-reading messages to ensure tone and context are accurately communicated, the study found: "As well, 67 percent of respondents admitted that they follow-up on important e-mail messages with a phone call."

Warren Shiau, Lead Analyst, IT Research, Strategic Counsel, said the majority of respondents "indicate they feel a need to use expressive tools like emoticons and Caps Lock in business e-mails to make sure the right message gets across."

 

Reflecting a national characteristic Canadians are concerned about how their e-mails are perceived by others, with 83 percent rereading their notes before sending. 89 percent say the phone and face-to-face are more effective ways of communicating important issues.