世論 What Japan Thinks

I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets email newsletters from various places that I just can’t unsubscribe from, and in Japan there seems to be no law or industry best practice to have a simple unsubscribe link even from reputable businesses, so this recent survey from iShare into unwanted email newsletters revealed how the average person copes with this situation.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 28th of September 2009 513 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.8% of the sample were male, 30.4% in their twenties, 33.3% in their thirties, and 36.3% in their forties.

My wife gets a shed-load of spam every day, especially from Rakuten (Japan’s largest online mall), who will sell on your address to their shops at the drop of a hat, so even if you unclick all the mail delivery boxes, you come back a day or two later and find that new boxes have appeared. I suspect in the small print when you buy something from one of their shops is some text saying that you agree to get email from other businesses from the same genre. She has mostly given up on unsubscribing, so she now has hundreds of addresses blocked in her mail client!

Research results

Q1: Have you ever received email newsletters on your mobile phone or computer? (Sample size=513)

	All	Male N=281	Female N=232
Currently receiving (to SQ1, SQ2)	82.7%	80.8%	84.9%
Used to receive (to SQ1, SQ2)	9.6%	9.3%	9.9%
Never received	7.8%	10.0%	5.2%

Q1SQ1: Have you continued to get an email newsletter even though you’d lost interest in the contents? (Sample size=473)

	All	Male N=253	Female N=220
Yes	77.8%	78.3%	77.3%
No	22.2%	21.7%	22.7%

Q1SQ2: Have you ever had a problem due to wanting to stop an email newsletter, but not knowing how to? (Sample size=473)

	All	Male N=253	Female N=220
Yes (to SQ3)	65.5%	66.8%	64.1%
No	34.5%	33.2%	35.9%

Q1SQ3: What did you do when you didn’t know how to stop an email newsletter? (Sample size=310, multiple answer)

	All	Male N=169	Female N=141
Gave up and kept receiving it	46.5%	47.3%	45.4%
Blocked the sender	44.5%	47.3%	41.1%
Asked the sender how to stop it, then stopped it	24.8%	24.3%	25.5%
Other	7.1%	5.9%	8.5%

Q2: Do you read the direct mail you get through the post? (Sample size=513)

	All	Male N=281	Female N=232
Read all of it	4.1%	3.9%	4.3%
Read most of it	31.0%	28.5%	34.1%
Don’t read most of it	48.7%	45.9%	52.2%
Don’t read any of it	16.2%	21.7%	9.5%