OME'09 - Spanish people and email.

Speaker:
Arianna Galante (Account Director, ContactLab)

All my comments are in italic

The Presentation:
ContactLab was created in 2000, it's an Italian ESP, now working in Spain.
They ran a study on the Spanish people and their relationship with email.
This study's results were presented during the forum.

Target of the study:
The target of the study was to gather information on the Spanish people behaviour regarding email in general and email marketing in particular.
It was ran on people born after 1993, that connect to internet at least once a month.

Subjects:
1) Volume:
How many emails did you receive yesterday ? -> 22,7 average
How many email accounts do you have ? -> 2,01 average (likely to be one personal and one professional)

=> This shows how important it is to make a difference!
=> You need to broadcast relevant campaigns
=> You need to segment your database and to personalize your emails


2) Reaction when receiving an "unsolicited" (or irrelevant) email:
I erase it without opening it : 66%
I unsubscribe : 53%

=> No one answered they would complain (which came as a surprise to me - I do think they are likely to, even though they didn't pick that answer)
=> You need to give back the power to your clients : placing the unsubscribe link on top of your emails, by clearly identifying yourself when sending, by chosing a subject line that matches the actual content of your mail, remind the user why he is receiving this email).
=> This is also why it is important to cleanup your database from inactive users.


3) How do they read their emails?

• What do they use to read their emails?

In a webmail : 45%
In a mail reader (outlook, thunderbird,...) : 25%
In both their webmail and a mail reader : 25%
On mobile devices : 5%

• Do they display images when reading a mail?

Images not displayed by default but displayed when reading the mail: 43%
Images displayed by default: 39%
Images never displayed (including while reading the email): 10,8%

• Equipment:

Personal Computer: 82%
Laptop: 56%
Mobile device: 10%

=> All these elements make it very important to make sure your emails display correctly whether images are on or off, and try to estimate the number of mobile devices users (and maybe send a full text version to these users).


4) Other types of messaging tools used:
Instant messaging tools (MSN, AIM, ICQ,...) : 79%
Social websites internal messaging system (facebook, linkedin,...): 49%

=> Therefore you need to adapt and to get involved in social networks. You probably want to search for new communication fields.


Conclusion:
To conclude, Arianna Galante summed up saying a successful Spanish (but is it only Spain we were talking about right now?) email campaign needs to be relevant, sent to a clean database. That your content needs to be designed to be relevant whether images are displayed (or diplayable) or not. Every new move has to be tested and the results analyzed.

Update: The full report is available here (thank you Nikki)