• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, November 14, 2016

If you ever wonder whether consumers have a love-hate relationship with email, the latest research from the DMA should extinguish all doubt -- they most certainly do. The organisation's 2016 email tracking report shows what every email marketer already knows, but also what they can do about it.

Email is the preferred route for brand communication. However, at the same time, here is the inconvenient truth every email marketer also knows: the public is fed up with too many pointless messages that either get deleted or ignored. Take a look at the figures from the new report and it becomes clear how being ignored may be a less obvious but still worrisome trend that is growing.

Nearly half of email recipients have a ghost account that is sort of active, because it is occasionally looked at, but is no longer truly used. I suspect that free WiFi is a factor here. A lot of people will have a near enough redundant email address they will use to sign up for WiFi hot spots so that any spam that may come their way will end up in an inbox that is rarely checked. I would imagine a lot of people have also done this for email addresses they routinely sign up to newsletters and the like with. In fact, nearly two in three -- or  62% -- of email users have ditched an email address at some stage because it has been receiving too many messages. The younger a person is, the more likely that they have a redundant or deleted account. 

Furthermore, just over two in three people report that most of the emails they get from brands contain information that is of no interest. Three-quarters of these uninteresting messages are deleted within a day.

It's important because the majority of Millennials are now revealing that smartphones are their main email device. On a mobile device, there is just a small screen -- and messages that are clearly of no interest will be selected and deleted, batch after batch. We all do it, and it will become more of an everyday activity. Hit "edit" and then select a bunch of messages to get rid of so the wheat can be separated from the proverbial chaff.

And to be clear on why people on your list have signed up to hear from you, nearly half have done so with the expectation that they will get good offers, and more than a third are hoping for free delivery or samples. So, don't go kidding yourself that consumers actively want to hear what you have to say. They have signed up get good deals and realise they have to put up with a tonne of messages that are of no interest to them.

Therein lies the point. Email marketers are very fortunate. The public still loves the channel, but they are getting a tad fed up with a tsunami of offers that hold no interest to them. So much so that they delete emails en-masse but, more importantly, run "ghost" accounts to save them the bother.

The answer is very simple -- offers obviously have to be good, and emails have to be personalised -- so decent offers or compelling messages that are personalised are the way forward. They represent why people sign up to hear from a brand in the first place as well as how they want to be understood. The alternative is to be among the majority of pointless messages that just rile consumers.