世論 What Japan Thinks

Email newsletter, or as they are known in Japanese English mail magazines (which is usually then abbreviated to meru-maga) are a popular way for companies to communicate with their customers and potential customers. To find out how popular, japan.internet.com reported on a recent survey conducted by goo Research into email newsletters.

Demographics

Over the 20th and 21st of January 2008 (don’t ask me why japan.internet.com took three months to report!) 1,100 members of the goo Research online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 14.4% in their teens, 20.3% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, and 27.6% aged fifty or older.

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Research results

Of the 1,100 people in the sample, 6 did not have computers or PDAs. The remaining 1,094 were asked the following questions.

Q1: How many email newsletters are you subscribed to? (Sample size=1,094)

One	3.2%
Two to five	43.3%
Six to ten	23.7%
Eleven to fifteen	7.5%
Sixteen to twenty	4.1%
Twenty-one or more	9.0%
None (to end of survey)	9.2%

The most popular type of newsletter was from PC or peripheral makers, with 56.2% receiving them, then 48.9% got newsletters from mail-order companies.

Q2: Do you read the email newsletters you receive? (Sample size=993)

Read them all	14.7%
Read the ones with interesting titles	76.7%
Hardly read any	7.4%
Read none at all	1.2%

Q3: When you stop reading an email newsletter, what do you most often do about it? (Sample size=993)

Unregister	60.9%
Delete mail by hand	16.0%
Send unsubscribe email request	9.8%
Don’t do anything in particular	8.5%
Flag them as spam	4.4%
Change email address	0.3%
Other	0.1%