Americans Trust Brands Over People, Says Survey

Consumers are more trusting of email newsletters sent from a brand or company name, according to a recent GoDaddy study, compared to messages with an employee or business owner’s name listed in the “from” line. 

GoDaddy surveyed 1,000 consumers on their email preferences in order to investigate what motivates abuse complaints, discovering that 60% of respondents trust email messages more when they are sent from a named corporation or organization.

Abuse complaints should be the smallest metric on any email report, as they occur when an email recipient labels an incoming email message as spam. Spam abuse complaints are separate from unsubscribes, and are even more detrimental to a sender’s reputation score. 

Abuse complaints hover on average between .001% and .003%, according to MailChimp. ISPs like Comcast and AT&T will begin to block emails sent from senders receiving too many spam complaints, and it can take several weeks for marketers to be removed from any spam blacklists.

The GoDaddy study suggests that professionalism is key to avoiding the spam folder. Unprofessional language and poor grammar were selected by 78% of respondents as a precursor to abuse complaints, while 64% of consumers said they dislike when subject lines are written in all capital letters, and 55% said that the lack of a physical address in an email would likely cause them to mark the email as spam. Eighty percent of respondents said that emails asking for personal details would likely be marked as spam -- the top-ranking cause for spam complaints, according to the report.

Relevance is key to avoiding unsubscribes, according to the report. The top two reasons that people unsubscribe from email newsletters are because the a’re receiving too many emails from the same company or because the emails they have received were not useful or relevant. Forty-three percent of respondents prefer companies that only send them one weekly email, while 26% expressed a preference for only receiving email when companies have something useful to share.

 

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