Bronto Blog

Bad consumer behavior mixed with bad email marketing practices is potentially brewing a perfect storm within Yahoo!

I raise the question: “What if consumers with Yahoo! accounts are not taking the time to manually mark what is truly SPAM?”

If the majority of consumer’s Yahoo! inboxes mirror mine, the chances that their frustration has boiled over is very real – hence they could be blindly and boldly checking the box at the top of the page and mass mark all messages as SPAM. By doing so they could be flagging several valid messages they have willingly subscribed to and are interested in viewing as SPAM in one simple and very tempting click of their mouse.

Sadly, the reason for why consumers are branding everything in their inbox as SPAM is because the vast majority is truly SPAM. The irony here is quite rich. Consumers have signed up to receive specific messages from trusted companies which in turn are not following best practices and are either renting, selling or partnering with other companies and creating a vicious cycle of meaningless email. This never ending sea of SPAM has spawned a trigger happy epidemic of consumers hitting the SPAM button with a passion.

EmailStatCenter.com provides several staggering stats surrounding SPAM that only adds to the storm:

• 26% of consumers unsubscribe using spam button - David Daniels, Vice President, JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
• Inbox providers, such as Yahoo, AOL and Gmail, all use the percentage of people who hit the "report spam" button for a particular sender as the No. 1 gage in considering whether to deliver incoming email to users' inboxes or not. - Direct Magazine (2007)
• By all accounts, any sender who gets a complaint rate higher than 0.5% will have serious delivery issues at these ISPs. - Direct Magazine (2007)
• Two out of every three email messages received by today's business users are spam. - Nucleus Research (2007)
• Users are spending 16 seconds identifying and deleting each spam email, which translates into an annual cost of $70 billion to all U.S. businesses. - Nucleus Research (2007)

Deliverability in Yahoo! no longer follows any true formula. The messages I want to receive are not getting delivered and the messages I really don’t want to receive continue to fool, trick, play… the application. My Yahoo! account has become imprisoned by the very system that was created to deter SPAM. The system has not ceased SPAM but has only ceased my inbox from functioning as my own.

Kimberly Snyder
Account Manager at Bronto