One in five Britons never opens brand emails: study

One in five Britons never open emails from brands, a new study suggests.

A Webtrends study questioned 2,000 British adults, and found they had an average of 260 unopened emails in their inbox, of which most (56%) were from brands, compared to 36% were spam and 7% were from friends and family. One in five (20%) said they never open emails from brands.

However, 55% of those questioned said they would open emails from retailers, while only 10% would open those from media companies and 12% from charities.

John Fleming, Webtrends marketing director EMEA and APAC, said: “One of the key reasons Brits are ignoring these emails is irrelevancy. While they’ve signed up to receive updates from brands, they’re self-selecting which ones they actually read and only opening the emails they find relevant.

“This ‘brand spam’ is also driving Brits barmy – in fact, survey respondents said it’s the most annoying thing a brand can do when it comes to communications, even worse than sending texts in the middle of the night. 84% of Brits say irrelevant brand spam drives them mad.”

He said that of those that never opened brand emails, 60% would be more likely to do so if the subject line contained information personalised to them. A further 65% sometimes or never open them, of whom 82% would be more likely to open personalised emails.