• by Ross Fadner , December 9, 2003

Despite all the hype surrounding the consumer backlash to email marketing, the majority of online users say they generally appreciate receiving legitimate email marketing messages, and are usually able to distinguish between legitimate offerings and spam. These are among the surprising findings of a survey of 1,054 U.S. adults conducted by Harris Interactive for Digital Impact.

In fact, 70 percent of those surveyed said they have requested to receive legitimate email marketing messages for a wide range of reasons, including discounts, special offers, reminders of events, and the chance to win something or to establish closer relations with a marketer.

Half of the survey respondents (51 percent) were also able to clearly distinguish legitimate email marketing practices from spam. This is either a positive or negative finding for some marketers, since the other half of online users presumably see no difference between legitimate offers and spam.

More than a third of users (38 percent) defined legitimate email marketing as containing information they opted in to receiving, while spam is email not requested by the user. Thirteen percent distinguished legitimate email from spam by identifying legitimate messages as those received from companies they have done business with in the past, while spam comes from companies they have never done business with.

And in what may be the most surprising finding of all, a significant number of users said they generally had a positive impression of legitimate email marketing: 77 percent agreed that they had a neutral-to-positive impression of legitimate email marketing messages.

In fact, many of the respondents were more annoyed when they did not receive email they had requested than when they received unsolicited email from spammers. Nearly three in ten (29 percent) attested to this, underscoring the value of legitimate email messages and perhaps raising a case for reevaluating certain ISP's overly aggressive spam filters.