Faced with a marketing email from a brand they don’t want emails from, US adults are as likely to unsubscribe from the list (41%) as they are to ignore the email (41%), according to recent research [download page] from Fluent. Counting in the 18% who will move the email to their spam folder (11%) or report it as spam (7%) and it seems that a majority of consumers will take some form of action to penalize unwanted emails.
Some consumers appear to be more forgiving than others, though. Male respondents (44%) were more likely than female respondents (39%), for example, to say that they’d ignore an unwanted email. Similarly, half of Millennials (18-29) would typically ignore a marketing email from a brand they don’t want emails from, compared to 39% of respondents aged 30 and older.
But while Millennials may be less likely to unsubscribe from lists due to unwanted emails, they’re also more apt to take stronger actions. Fully 11% said they would report an unwanted email as spam, more than double the proportion (5%) of those aged 30 and older.
Even so, separate results from the report suggest that Millennials are more receptive to marketing emails than their older counterparts, a finding in line with other Fluent research into emails’ purchase influence. For example, 51% in this latest study prefer to receive marketing emails from a brand on at least a weekly basis, compared to 41% of respondents aged 30 and up. Millennials are also twice as likely to say they always open marketing emails (18% vs. 9%) and likewise twice as apt to say that the marketing emails they receive are frequently or always useful (25% vs. 13%).
It’s worth considering why subscribers sign up for marketing emails in the first place, too. On this front, the Fluent survey finds that special offers top discounts as the main reason for subscribing, though lower-income consumers (under $50k) are more motivated by discounts than special offers.
For readers interested in learning more about email engagement and purchase influence, the following MarketingCharts reports are relevant:
- 3rd Annual “Advertising Channels With the Largest Purchase Influence on Consumers” Study; and
- [Debrief] Why Consumers Open Brand Emails
About the Data: The Fluent data is based on a survey of 1,948 American adults (18+) who have email addresses.
