NEVER EVER reply directly to a notification sent via email. It is almost assuredly a fraud or method of getting someone to log on to a faked out site for nefarious purposes.
Well.....
I'll let you all in on the purpose of the survey - and also why Roarmeister, while being absolutely, 100% correct in one regard - is so problematic for companies that want to do business with him. .
One of our clients is a big financial services firm. One of the many ways they try to cut costs is with paperless communications. There's big money - I'm talking about hundreds of millions in the industry, perhaps billions - in moving customers to paperless communications - so the motivation to push people to paperless is high.
At the same time, the risks for "phishing" attacks - email that is intended to trick people into giving up their login information to financial sites - are very real. eBay is a
major target for phishing attacks but almost any company that involved real money is a target. In 2008,
phishing attacks are on the rise. . In 2007, losses from phishing were
about 3 Billion dollars , which sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider that online shipping
alone was about $116 Billion Dollars, and that
3/4 of Americans pay their bills online and
half of all Americans use online banking you come to a market that's processing transactions worth about a trillion dollars a year.
Let's put that into a pie chart - 3 Billion Fraud vs. 1 Trillion in transactions:
[img]http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:3,997&chs=250x100&chl=Fraud|Legit[/img]
Suddenly, the 3 Billion is chump change - a rounding error, and well within tolerances at an industry level.
Still, in our work, we're seeing and increasing disconnect between "open rates" for email and "click through rates" for emails and the behavior we see on the site. Plenty of new people are signing up for paperless statements, but I'm seeing a relatively flat line on open and click throuhg rates. I looked at my own behavior - and I don't open the messages, and I don't click through, I just look at the subject "Your Statement is Ready" and since I know I have an account with the company, I just go direct to the web site and check the statement. I'm too close to the fraud and such and although I'm an "expert" in digital media, for me that means I don't actually trust myself to be able to casually spot a really good phishing trick that exploits a flaw in Gmail that nobody but the bad guy knows about.
So, the 2 question survey sees to get behavioral information to go further than the sample size of ME.
As it stands, only 49.1% of the respondents say that they "Almost Always" open the messages, if we compare it to the number of people who don't open paper mail, it's an appalling contrast. I need a LOT more responses before I trust the survey and I can get to confidence levels that let me go with a plan.
My challenge for 2009 - develop a strategy that motivates people to go to the paperless route, ensures that the messaging we use to notify people electronically is reaching the customers, and minimizes security risks for all parties to the transaction. Simple, right?
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