New research indicates that when it comes to email marketing, UK consumers favour simple formats and designs as well as those which keep them informed of promotions or other value-for-money messages.

Research conducted by the Internet Affairs Bureau in partnership with ICD research has given some key insights into the best way for brands and businesses to conduct bulk email marketing campaigns. Surveying 1,000 people from a “nationally representative sample” about their attitudes towards email marketing strategies, their preferred layout and how their usage of such messages, the research suggested that email remains one of the strongest channels for digital marketing.

This is because for 85% of people, email is a vital communications tool, with personal accounts checked by 88% of people every day of the week. Although this is in part for professional reasons, the majority (65%) of email use is for personal reasons and therefore a prime opportunity for brands to engage with customers. For example, a third of people say they first became aware of a brand or product they are interested in because of email marketing messages.

It also highlighted several of what the IAB has termed ”key considerations” for email marketing campaigns. Guy Phillipson, CEO of the IAB UK said: “Email is a key element of the marketer’s armoury, yet it remains essential that brands remember what resonates most with consumers when planning email campaigns.”

Perhaps chief among these considerations is the value of permission marketing in building customer relationships and engagement; 87% of consumers admitted to regularly deleting emails without opening them because they believed they had never opted in to hearing from that brand.

Nevertheless, when permission marketing agreements are transparent to the consumer, email can be a good way of keeping consumers in touch with brands they are already familiar with. The value of email as a retention tool can be seen in the 60% of people who said they used email to receive information from their “favourite” brands and separately, 52% of consumers said they liked to receive emails that related to products and services they had already purchased.

The link between brand products and services and customer engagement is an important one. Overwhelming, consumers were drawn to emails which offered promotions or money off purchases. 70% of people said they were likely to open a message if it had some sort of offer or incentive, whilst 69% said they would open an email if it offered money off a product or service. In fact, 66% of people said they primarily participated in email marketing campaigns because the brands gave them good offers.

Conversely, personalised emails (42%) and topical messages (19%) were less popular. By and large, it appears simplicity is key to email marketing in the eyes of consumers, particularly where design and layout of content is concerned.

“We know that email is still an important part of people’s daily lives,” says Phillipson, “but this research shows that as online evolves into a more multi-tasking experience, a simple, strong promotion offering something of real value is what gets the best response.”

According to the survey, 42% of people would likely delete an email if they thought they didn’t have time to read it – meaning that long messages or complicated multimedia could deter potential customers from reading such messages at all. In fact, when presented with examples of email layout, by far the most popular were those that were “easy to understand and navigate” and ”get straight to the point” through a combination of short text, images and hyperlinks to deeper content.