Small Businesses Struggle To Get Their Email Noticed, New Study Says

The prevelance of spam and email filtering is negatively impacting the ability for small businesses to get noticed, new study says.

(PRWEB) July 1, 2004 -- Small Businesses Struggle To Get Their Email Noticed, New Study Says

In a recent study of its own Web-savvy userbase, SitePoint.com discovered that less than 30% of electronic newsletter subscribers opens any issue they receive. The findings show exactly how difficult it is for legitimate marketers to break through the clutter created by junk email and avoid spam filters.

"Legitimate small businesses that aim to contact customers or offer special deals over email are unlikely to succeed due to overcrowded inboxes* and various spam filters. It's a very tough market," said Matt Mickiewicz, COO of SitePoint.

Mickiewicz also commented on the emergence of so-called challenge-response systems" such as ChoiceMail and SpamArrest. "The prevalence of anti-spam systems that require senders to manually verify their identities poses a real problem to anyone who sends out more than a couple thousand emails per month. It creates a lot of extra labor for senders, and there's just no way to automate it."

The news is not entirely bleak, however. "We've recently seen the emergence of services such as IronPort's BondedSender program," Mickiewicz added. BondedSender guarantees legitimate marketers that their email bypasses spam filters at hundreds of millions of Inboxes. I think we'll see more of these services in the near future."

SitePoint, an online magazine and book publisher for Web professionals, conducted the study across its three regular newsletters, with a total
subscriber base of over 150,000 double opt-in addresses. All three newsletters' open rates hovered around 30% in March-May, 2004.

*Source: MSNBC, Now, two-thirds of all e-mail is spam, By Bob Sullivan, May 22, 2004

Contact:
Matt Mickiewicz - matt [at sitepoint.com
604 716 4638 (West Coast)