Articles

Junk Email on the Rise - What can you do?

In the year since the US passed the Can Spam Act, junk email has risen almost 30%.

Just over a year ago the US Federal Government passed the Can Spam Act, essentially banning unsolicited junk email. Despite this, unsolicited email has come to total almost 80 percent (or perhaps more) of all email sent, well up from 50 to 60 percent before the legislation was passed - this as reported in the February 1st, 2005 edition of The New York Times.

While the marketing research industry has been relatively proactive in the use of double opt-in email lists when conducting research online, we certainly contribute to the perceived problem of overwhelming in-boxes around the globe, similar to how the industry contributed to the do not call legislation that banned annoying and unwanted telephone calls.

The research industry is now facing the same challenge online that it has been fighting for well over 10 years offline - unscrupulous and annoying direct marketing efforts are threatening the life blood of the industry by decreasing respondent cooperation, which in turn creates concerns regarding non-response error, survey bias, and generally unreliable response rates.

This may sound familiar if you're in the research industry, but all is not doom-and-gloom; there is hope! It comes in the form of online custom panels, which use gold standard research practices in terms of respondent cooperation. You'll have respondents inviting your emails into their in-boxes.

Custom Panels provide the research industry with an opportunity to engage respondents in survey research, with encouragement through the intelligent use of incentives, without being considered 'SPAM'. Recruiting respondents using appropriate double opt-in techniques creates the impression that survey research is 'different', thereby not overextending potential respondent's goodwill. Custom Panels provide researchers with the ability to not only use double opt-in research techniques, they provide the ability to shorten the length of surveys, and launch them more frequently (cognitive recall of participating in a panel decreases the likelihood that email invitations are considered SPAM). Recruit once, invite regularly,

It is only after we as an industry elevate our best practices that we will achieve the collective benefit of higher respondent cooperation rates and a disassociation with email marketers. Developing a custom online panel to service your marketing research program can ensure that you engage your respondents with positive online research experiences, and assist the research industry as a whole to rise above the SPAM!

Posted on February 1, 2005
Permalink