Survey on Email shows Impact of Spam on Users' Behaviour

The fourth of DoubleClick's annual US consumer email studies points to an increasing sophistication in consumer usage of email, greater management of spam, and a more complex buying behaviour.

The spam crisis continues to affect behaviour online but an overwhelming majority of online consumers receive offers by email and have made a purchase online or offline as a result.

People are using available tools to limit spam and are employing separate email accounts for purchasing, all in attempts to increase control and improve their email experience.

The key findings of the study included:
* The majority of consumers receive some kind of marketing email, most commonly with special offers from retailers.
* Sender recognition most determines open rates, while content relevance increases likeliness to purchase.
* Frequency preferences, or how often respondents prefer to receive emails of a certain category, are very specific to the category of email but vary greatly from one consumer to the next; frequency of permission based email is clearly a great concern to consumers and has an impact on what they consider to be spam.
* Email drives multi-channel purchases and has an immediate as well as a latent impact. It drives consumers most often to the online channel but also results in retail and catalogue sales.
* Consumers have become sophisticated in their use of ISP-supplied tools to limit spam and in their usage of various email addresses to manage their varied email activities. Home and free email addresses are most often used for purchasing, with one email address specifically designated for that use.
* Men and women have radically different ideas of what spam is and different purchasing behaviour related to spam. Women are more receptive to promotions and discounts and correspondingly more interested in and tolerant of marketing emails than men.

DoubleClick worked with Beyond Interactive and the NFO//net source panel of 900,000 US consumers to poll 1,000 consumers via email from July 30 - August 5 2003. All respondents recruited use email/internet 1+ times per week, which reflects the usage of the larger online population (94% of the 18+ online population according to Nielsen, 2003). There was an equal segmentation of men and women and the average age was 42.7.

This is the fourth of an annual series of consumer research studies and trending information was derived using the data from previous years. The sample mirrored previous studies and is reflective of the online population as a whole.

Associated Link: DoubleClick 2003 Consumer Email Study

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