In order to keep the latest understanding on the attitude of the public towards email marketing and the impact of spam, following by the survey conducted in Quarter 1, Radica Systems Ltd. with the two mentioned parties, completed the Quarter 2 survey in July and successfully collected 1,351 valid responses. It is our honor to invite Prof. Tam Kar Yan from Department of Information and Systems Management of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and he has announced 5 significant findings in today conference.
 

Continually Serious Spam Problem

Respondents claimed that on average, spam mail accounts for over 46% of all received emails daily; it costs them about 9 minutes on average to handle spam mails everyday. 43% respondents would pay for a solution to solve the spam problem, while 26% of them even willing to pay $11 to $50 on it. These data indicated that nearly half of Hong Kong residence can no longer tolerate the inconvenience caused by spam. Government should take immediate legal control on spam.
 

Permission-based Email Marketing is Imperative

 This survey shows, 88% of respondents will delete emails from unknown senders while it ’ s not yet open, while 62% would open and read the opt-in emails, and 16% even feel interest in reading permitted emails. This significant difference indicated that permission-based email marketing will become an appropriate practice that all corporations had to execute when doing email marketing.
 

 Many Permitted Emails Treated as Spam by ISPs

 73% of respondents indicated that their opt-in emails “sometimes”, “quite frequent” and very frequent” ending up having their emails automatically being moved and delivered to their junk mail box by the ISPs. ISPs should pay serious attention to address this problem and protect the normal email marketing activities. This also reminds the marketers should keep track of deliverability report after email marketing campaigns launched, so that to be able to evaluate the campaigns ’ result more accurately.
 

 The Marketing Effect of Emails is Indispensable

 38% of respondents have experience of making purchase the promotional items after reading emails; while 75 % in total claimed that they have finally completed the purchase through different channels as a result of receiving a promotional email. This figure has reflected the effectiveness and impact of email in driving sales lead. Marketers may consider how to adapt email channel in their overall marketing plan, under the law.
 

Popularity of Different Brands ’ Promotional Email

 The research has evaluated the popularity of promotional emails from different brands in five major industries, which summarized in the following:

Remarks: “1” is the most favorite brand

Prof. Tam Kar Yan said, ”Obviously, people likes to read their subscribed e-mails, and feel annoy when they receive email from the unknown senders. Therefore, the UEM bill not only protects the public from spam problems, it can also create a healthy environment for the growth of email marketing and further encourages the technology development of the email marketing.”

Francis Kwok , CEO of Radica Systems Ltd. comments: “the survey findings indicated that the government should monitor and control the spam problem by codification as soon as possible. At the same time, we cannot ignore the effect of email marketing for the enterprises. We would suggest the related parties consider organizing more relevant seminars/workshops for the corporate marketers, in order to foster them how to effectively and legally launch permission-based email campaigns, thus, to protect the normal email marketing activities.”

Similar research will be held periodically. This survey was conducted from 16 June to 11 July 2006, via online and email invitations. 1,351 valid responses were collected, where 46% are male and the other 54% are female. 98% are over 18-year-old.

About Radica Systems Limited (www.radicasys.com)

Radica is a leading intelligent e-Marketing software company based in Hong Kong. With diversified client base including Fortune Global 500 companies, Hong Kong listed companies and SMEs, we are committed to innovate the best-in-class e-Marketing software technology that ultimately brings in real benefits to our clients. Our R&D focuses on the adaptive personalization domain with artificial intelligence which is applicable to e-marketing and e-sales. Radica Intimate has won the Hong Kong Outstanding Software Application Competition 2005 and the Best Oracle Partner Network Technology Award (Greater China) this year.

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