How much is too much?

Anecdotally I’m hearing a few different things about recent mail sends.

  1. Multiple ESPs are reporting that their customers, combined, sent more than 2 Billion emails on Friday. SendGrid was close to 3 Billion. Mailchimp was over 2 billion. When all is said and done, I wouldn’t be surprised if the final volume totals topped 20 billion emails in a single day.
  2. One person reported they went to bed with an empty inbox and woke up to almost 400 emails for Black Friday.
  3. Another person reported pages of emails in their promotions tab “too many to read!”
  4. Anecdotally I’m seeing some marketers report lowered open rates compared to normal sends.

Statista says there are somewhere between 230 and 250 million Americans that use email. Taking the higher figure, and a conservative 15 billion emails sent on black friday, that’s 60 emails per person. Conservatively, every US consumer received 60 emails last Friday.

Back in the dark ages, when we were trying to convince people spam was a problem, one of the arguments was that mail was cheap and spammers would send more mail than users could handle. The solution, as we saw it, was to turn email into a permission based system. If people only received mail they asked for, then they wouldn’t be overwhelmed with volume. Now, we’ve reached the point where a single day’s permission based email is overwhelming recipients to the point where they can’t read all of them.

Does that mean I think Black Friday mail is spam? Absolutely not. It was all wanted and asked for mail. But, when a recipient is getting 50 or 100 or 300 or 500 emails in their inbox in a day it takes time to read all of it. They may be excited the first few dozen emails, but as the day goes on

I’m not surprised that some marketers are seeing a lowering of open rates when inboxes are so crowded. I expect that what happened is recipients actually opened more email than their usual amount. But due to the significant increases in volume, each individual sender saw lower open rates.

It seems there’s no limit to the amount of email retailers can send. Is there a limit to the amount of email recipients can read?

 

 

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Want some history?

I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which are still true and even relevant.

From a historical perspective, the footnotes are the real meat of the document. Professor Sorkin discusses many different cases that together establish the rights of ISPs to filter mail, some of which I wasn’t aware of. He also includes links to then-current news articles about filtering and spam. He also mentions different websites and articles written by colleagues and friends from ‘back in the day’ discussing spam on a more theoretical level.
CNET articles on spam and filtering was heavily referenced by Professor Sorkin. One describes the first Yahoo spam folder. Some things never change, such as Yahoo representatives refusing to discuss how their system works. There were other articles discussing Hotmail deploying the MAPS RBL (now a part of Trend Micro) and then adding additional filters into the mix a few weeks later.
We were all a little naive back then. We thought the volumes of email and spam were out of control. One article investigated the effectiveness of filters at Yahoo and Hotmail, and quoted a user who said the filters were working well.

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Transactional mail can be spam

Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out.

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