More Canadian email news today! Ipsos published an article about Canadians thoughts and opinions towards email marketing. The article is free for subscribers, but I will touch on some of the interesting points here:

• 65% of Canadians prefer communicating via email over other methods, although on the flip side, 44% of us agree that we can hardly keep up with the amount of email that we receive.
• After two years of ‘winning the war against spam’, the volume of spam has increased 51% in 2006 to an average of 130 emails per week.
• Spam overload does have an impact on legitimate email marketing because of the fact that the lines are often blurred between the two in consumer’s minds.
• 80% of Canadian Internet users have registered with at least one website to receive permission-based email, with the typical Canadian Internet user registering with an average of slightly more than eight websites

My favourite part of the article comes here, under the subtitle “Email Marketing is Successful in Engaging Internet Users“, particularly, the article provides some insight into what consumers like to receive:

Respondents also expressed interest in receiving discounts (82%), free gifts (73%), contest offerings and tips (70% each), and interest is also relatively high in eCoupons (61%), industry news (50%) or eFlyers (49%).

And finally, what influence is email having over consumers buying and purchasing habits?

A significant minority of Canadian Internet users have forwarded a direct email they have received on to a friend or colleague (27%), purchased the advertiser’s product or service at a later date (20%), or purchased the advertiser’s product or service from the website (16%).

Ipsos comes out with interesting articles about email marketing pretty frequently - I would encourage you to sign up (for free) for Ipsos-Ideas.

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