Table of Contents
Email and its widespread adoption
Tactics of segmentation and personalization
Email Metrics, Deliverability, and All That
Influence of the anti-spam guideline – GDPR
Bringing new tools and technology to emails
Despite the mushrooming of various marketing channels and social media platforms, email has emerged to be the most promising marketing tool. Many marketers rely on email marketing for several reasons, namely:
1. Building their brand
2. Distributing the content
3. Launching a new product
4. Promoting their offers
5. Nurturing the hot leads
6. Sending Holiday wishes
7. Re-engaging the dormant subscribers
8. Implementing cart recovery programs
9. Updating the buyers about the order status
With so many purposes to serve, email works as a cost-effective channel to get results and drive conversions.
To put things into perspective, we are here with a whole lot of email marketing stats that will give you a holistic view of how email marketing works.
We’ve broadly divided the email statistics into different categories for your convenience.
1. Email and its widespread adoption
Since we are talking about facts and figures, it is important to note that Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email across a network, more than half a decade back in the year 1971. He used the “@” sign to separate the user names and the machine name. The message was sent from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10.
With that retrospection in mind, emails have come a long way from plain-text layout to the modern-day interactive emails or mailable microsites.
That said, let’s shed light on some interesting email marketing facts and statistics that speak volumes about the opportunity this channel can unravel.
91% of the respondents rated email as the most important channel when it comes to their strategic importance.
Even CRM managers second this thought.
When Email Uplers carried out a survey for CRM managers, 100% of them said that they use emails for sending marketing messages.
In 2019, there were 3.9 billion global email users, as revealed by Statista, 2020.
In 2023, this figure will touch the whopping number of 4.3 billion users, 50% of the population of the entire world.
Number of emails sent every day
- In 2019, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received daily.
- Fast-forwarding to 2022, this number will be 347.3 billion.
Individual share of emails
- Radicati had predicted that one user would receive or send 126 messages by the end of 2019. (This number was 122 back in 2015.)
- Around 96 emails will be received, out of which only 77 emails will be authentic. The rest will be spam emails.
This brings us to the next question:
Worldwide Email Accounts
When compared to the number of worldwide email users, there will be a slightly faster growth of worldwide email accounts.
By the beginning of 2019, 3.8 billion email accounts existed in the world.
2. Preference for Email
Email marketing vs Social media- This has been an unending debate for marketers. We think social media should be used along with email marketing for a fruitful business strategy.
Smart Insights reported that emails yield 50 to 100 times higher click-through rate when compared to Facebook and Twitter combined. Also, email marketing can be almost ten times cheaper than Facebook ads.
Talking about the consumer’s perspective, 60% of the customers subscribe to a brand’s email list in order to receive promotional messages.
On the other hand, only 20% of consumers follow brands on social media to learn about deals. That pretty much clears the haze around how email is here to stay.
If we talk about usage statistics, most of the people prefer email over social media, regardless of the age group they fall in.
Most of them check email rather than social media, company intranet, news, or search.
This could be attributed to the fact that there are more email users when compared to social media users.
Engagement of social media is much lower than that of emails. Overall engagement of social media is 0.58% for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
On the contrary, emails reach 85% of the people you send it to and give an open rate of 22.86% and click-through rate of 3.71%.
Social media ROI is still a question mark because we cannot really track it accurately.
That brings us to our next point of Email ROI.
3. Email ROI and Lifetime Value
It is easy to assume that email marketing has a massive return on investment if you chalk out a well-planned strategy.
This is also clear from the results carried out by two leading organizations.
i. According to DMA, emails bring an ROI of £42 for every pound spent. This means an increase of around £10 when compared to the previous study.
ii. SuperOffice has revealed that email brings a return on investment of $51 for every $1 spent.
Another study by Litmus found the ROI to be $42 for every $1 sent.
According to Econsultancy, 73% of marketers rate email as the top digital channel as far as ROI is concerned.
It also revealed that email marketing generates around
According to a study, email marketing brings $0.08 in revenue per email sent. Imagine the ROI you can drive if you are sending emails to 100,000 subscribers. It will yield $8000 in revenue, which is pretty HUGE.
The lifetime value of an email address has markedly increased as it is believed to be worth £37 on average. This value was higher in the case of B2C (£41) when compared to B2B (£35).
4. Tactics of segmentation and personalization
Segmentation and personalization are like the two foundation stones of an effective email marketing strategy. Segmented lists help to send out more relevant and personalized emails to the subscribers. These personalized emails strike the right chord with the recipients and ultimately bring higher ROI. (Also, note that 74% of customers get frustrated when website content does not match their interests.)
78% of marketers say that list segmentation is the marketing automation feature they cannot do away with.
According to a study by Campaign Monitor, segmented campaigns result in an increase of 760% in revenue.
In 2017, Mailchimp carried out a study with 2000 Mailchimp users who deployed 11,000 segmented campaigns to around 9 million subscribers.
The results were something like this:
SuperOffice concluded that segmented email campaigns earned 94% open rate and a 38% click-through rate in comparison to non-segmented emails bringing an open rate of 42% and a click-through rate of 4.5%.
Talking about personalization, Conversant Media has concluded that 66% of marketers are looking forward to securing in-house professionals to implement their personalized marketing programs.
Personalization can open up opportunities to generate $20 in ROI for every $1 invested.
50% of companies believe that email marketing will increase email interaction with the help of personalization.
Sadly, 70% of companies still do not employ personalization in their email marketing strategy.
Litmus revealed similar results that almost three-fourths of marketers say email personalization increases engagement.
Coming to the question of “how” do businesses personalize emails, 80% of financial services companies personalize the body copy of emails when compared to 55% of retail or ecommerce or consumer goods and services companies.
These factors were used to personalize email content in the majority of the emails. It shows the huge shift in personalization tactics.
Of course, there are some obstacles to email personalization like lack of data or resources.
66% of marketers revealed that they do not have the resources to execute personalized programs.
5. Email Automation
Automation is the silver bullet for any email marketer, so say marketing automation statistics. It eliminates any manual intervention while allowing you to reach out to the right people at the right time with the right message. Automated emails include all those emails, starting from welcome and onboarding to nurturing the prospects to promoting new offers to re-engaging them to occasion-based emails.
These facts and figures will reinforce your belief in this tactic.
Automated emails drive 320% more revenue when compared to non-automated emails.
VentureBeat also reported that the email marketing conversion rate for automated emails is 180% higher than batch emails.
No wonder, 55% of companies have embraced the technology of marketing automation.
While 43% of brands send out segmented email campaigns, 33% send out automated emails, and only 24% practice none of these tactics.
Starting with the very first type of automated emails, welcome emails have an open rate of 82%. (This is huge because the average email open rate is close to 21%.)
Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases. Birthday emails generate 3.42 times more revenue per message when compared to a traditional promotional email. The reason for this could be the feeling of exclusivity that it imparts.
If you are an ecommerce marketer, you can swear by these two stats.
- Transactional emails bring 8 times more opens and clicks when compared to other emails, not to forget the 6x higher revenue.
- Customers who receive automated abandoned cart emails are 2.4 times more likely to complete the purchase.
- Choose to send a series of welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, and re-engagement emails. I say so because according to a study by Omnisend, sending a series of 3 cart abandonment emails resulted in 69% more orders when compared to a single email.
6. Subject Lines
Like your body language is a mirror of your personality, your subject line works as a representative of your entire email.
Let’s have a look at some intriguing facts about email subject lines.
33% of email recipients open emails because of catchy subject lines.
69% of people will report an email as spam according to the subject line. That pretty much reveals why the average email marketing open rates rest at 17.92%.
Personalized email subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened. Multichannel retailers have observed a 37% increase in unique open rates with personalized email subject lines in relation to non-personalized ones.
Using the recipient’s name in the email subject lines will lead to a 21.2% open rate.
Email subject lines tapping on FOMO by creating a sense of urgency have a higher open rate of 22% when compared to the ones that don’t. 56% of people experience FOMO and 68% have made an impulsive purchase because of this feeling and learning about someone else’s experience.
Including the word “free” in the subject line increases the likelihood of getting the email opened by 10%.
Note: The word “free” is not a spam trigger.
The fact is using the word “free” in all capital letters gets a better open rate than without using capitals.
On the other hand, using the word “newsletter” and “you” led to an 18% and 5% decrease in the open rates respectively.
Other than that, refrain from using words like journal, whitepaper, forecast, and training.
Coming to emojis in subject lines, including emojis in subject lines increased the open rates by 1071% on Android and 662% on iOS. This came after careful analysis of 9400 mobile marketing campaigns.
Triggered email messages with emojis have increased by more than 7000%.
A report by Appboy deduced that the use of emojis in mobile messages and emails has increased by 775% year-over-year.
Here are the top 15 emojis used in email subject lines.
7. Email Testing
Email testing is another important aspect when it comes to email marketing effectiveness. The good part is that there has been a significant increase in the belief marketers had in their skills.
According to a study carried out in 2018, 33% of the people consider themselves at an intermediate level while 15% are at an advanced level. This is up from the results of the previous years.
Coming to the frequency of email testing, around 17% test it for half to three email campaigns, while 38% test it for under a quarter of campaigns. The trend of testing has got more popular over the years and more marketers are likely to employ frequent testing.
8. Email Workflows
With all the closely intertwined processes, it is no cakewalk to produce a well-designed email. Litmus revealed that most of the teams take one to two weeks for the completion of a single email. Nearly 25% needed a month or more.
Talking about email briefs, most teams use an email brief at least sometimes while others do not.
The majority of the teams plan a month in advance, regardless of the season.
Three out of four teams depend on their ESP for the plain-text email versions and send them unedited.
More and more people are using email design programs and more people used the designing tool that the ESP provided.
Email templates continue to be the favorite when compared to HTML email framework.
60% of companies have 4 or more people involved in the process of email review and approval.
Optimizing email workflow is the priority for around 50% of the marketers and 30% find the approval process too burdensome.
These are the departments involved in the review and approval process.
Email teams face a serious hurdle in achieving maximum productivity because of these reasons:
- Ad-hoc approval methods
- Last-minute changes
- Unclear requirements
- Inefficient testing methods
- Disorganized meetings about email
It is intriguing to know that around 48% of people had to halt their email during sending because of errors.
9. Email Metrics, Deliverability, and All That
Email metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribes, and spam complaints vary according to various factors like country, the impact of GDPR, and business industry. Most of the companies monitor the open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate. Advanced metrics like ROI, email read time, and subscriber lifetime value are rarely tracked. Google Analytics enjoys the highest patronage from marketing professionals.
While non-profits enjoy the highest open rate, agencies see the lowest open rate. The communications and publishing industry can boast of the highest click-through rate.
Legal services and sports and activities sectors see the highest landing page conversions.
If we talk about the adoption of single opt-in versus double opt-, maximum people are still using the single opt-in method, This is fine, so long as you have generated a privacy policy that clarifies how you’ll use this information.
Deliverability is a crucial element of email marketing. Unfortunately, 21% of emails never land in the subscriber’s inboxes. Therefore, spam testing remains a popular tactic to enhance the inbox placement rate.
When 1.5 million emails were tested, 70% of them showed at least one such problem that would hamper deliverability. ESP spam filter tests and Litmus Testing top the list when it comes to testing the email for spam. However, only 14% tested every email for this issue.
10. Competence in Email Marketing
As simple as it seems from afar, email marketing can get pretty complex because of the intricate processes involved.
When marketers were asked about their organization’s level of competence in email marketing, only 18% believed it to be advanced while 37% were still in the intermediate zone.
11. Challenges with Execution of Email Marketing Programs
Marketers experience several roadblocks when it comes to implementing their email marketing programs.
These challenges revolved around budget issues, problems related to data, and strategy.
Here’s a detailed histogram to give you a deeper insight into all the major challenges.
When Email Uplers approached professional CRM managers about the bottleneck in execution, the majority of them voted for lack of resources with data management in the second place.
12. Influence of the anti-spam guideline – GDPR
The email marketing landscape has changed drastically after the introduction of GDPR in 2018. The rules for sending have become stricter which has reduced unsolicited emails in the inbox.
Most of the marketers (56%) feel positive about the impact of GDPR on the operations while only 20% are negative about it.
B2C organizations (27%) are somewhat more negative than B2B firms (21%).
Comparing larger organizations to the smaller ones, the former exhibited less positive sentiment. While 59% of SMEs were positive about GDPR, only 39% of very large enterprises thought the same.
13. Frequency of emails
Most marketers believe that a guideline for frequency of contact must be implemented at the organization. In 2018, 87% of the respondents agreed with this thought compared to 77% in the 2017 survey.
Ironically enough, marketers might be overestimating the number of messages sent, and consumers are receiving less spam owing to the execution of GDPR.
Take a look at this interesting bar graph that compares the perspective of marketers and customers.
49% of the customers said that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands once every week.
A sad stat is that the relevance of the emails still continues to be an issue. 86% of consumers believe less than half of the emails are useful to them.
However, in research by Seventh Sense, almost half of the participants said that they plan to send more emails to communicate with the customers.
Smartrmail has come up with three commandments for email frequency:
- Send one email per week to make sure you are making the most out of the sales opportunities and not getting the prospects disengaged.
- For people who are just starting off with email, send one or two bulk emails every week.
- You will observe a low engagement level without any sales if you send an email every second day.
Note: If you are in the fashion industry, you can send up to 6 emails per week, according to Zettasphere. Just keep testing and optimizing your frequency: That’s the key.
14. Best time to send emails
There are a lot of subjective things in email marketing operations. One of them is the ideal time to send emails. It depends on your business industry and target audience.
It is no brainer that daytime is better for sending emails when compared to night time.
Do not send email blasts on Mondays as people might be flooded with emails during the weekend. Again, avoid sending emails on weekends as they have a low open rate.
Conventionally, it is believed that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days to send email campaigns.
Mailchimp has confirmed that Tuesday and Thursday are the two ideal days to send email newsletters.
GetResponse, on the other hand, found that Monday and Tuesday topped the list when it came to email opens and clicks. Saturday and Sunday were the top 2 choices for increasing click-to-open rate.
Talking about the right time, Mailchimp has suggested 2pm as the best time to send email campaign . 1-3pm or 9-11am also work well for certain companies.
According to WordStream, the best time to send emails is 8-9am on Thursdays. Tuesday and Wednesday 8-10am is the worst choice for sending emails.
GetResponse has suggested that emails sent at 10am and 1pm bring the highest open rate. Sending emails later in the afternoon or around 6pm will bring the maximum click-through rate.
The thumb rule is to test and figure out for yourself because, as they say, there is no “ideal” time that applies to every company.
15. Email design trends to follow
There has been a considerable advancement in the way emails are being sent. They emulate the feeling of a mini-website in that little email interface.
Let’s start with interactivity.
Kapost reports interactive content generates 200% more conversions when compared to passive content. Zembula found that interactive content generates 400%-500% more pageviews than static content.
In 2019, Campaign Monitor revealed that interactive email content increases click-to-open rate by 73%. Adding videos can increase click rates by up to 300%.
Two other email design trends that are in the limelight for the coming years are Dark Mode and AMP.
More and more email clients are extending their support to these technologies.
As of March 2020, around 91.8% people have embraced dark mode with open arms.
In November 2019, Polar also had revealed that 95% people prefer dark mode.
16. Purpose of email
As discussed at the outset, email marketing can be used for different purposes. According to the industry and type of product or service you are dealing with, you might be using emails for various reasons.
According to Content Marketing Institute, around 9 out of every 10 marketers take the help of emails for organic content distribution.
On the other hand, 81% of small and medium-sized businesses depend on email for customer acquisition, and 80% rely on it for retention.
The primary objectives of email campaigns are sales (62%), engagement (50%), brand awareness (47%), and building loyalty (45%). Only a quarter mentioned customer service.
60% of B2C organizations use email for customer engagement.
17. Device Used to Access Emails
Mobile has emerged as the most popular device to access emails. Almost 61% people open the marketing emails on these devices.
Take a look at this histogram that shows email marketing statistics related to how brands use desktop-centric, mobile-friendly, and responsive designs.
Yesmail deduced that the average revenue per mobile email is $0.40 which is more than 4 times in relation to desktop email click.
55% of smartphone users have made at least one purchase on receiving a mobile promotional email.
Flexmail supported these B2B email marketing stats with their report that 36% of B2B companies that optimized their email campaigns for mobile devices observed an overall improvement in their email performance. As you can see, B2B email marketing statistics show better results for mobile optimized emails.
18. Bringing new tools and technology to emails
Email marketers are trying to bring in new tools and technological advancements to increase the effectiveness of emails and make it more relevant for the users. Automation tools have already become an indispensable part of email marketing and the same is expected out of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is interesting to note that only 17% of email marketing professionals who planned to explore automation in 2018 considered AI.
Artificial Intelligence works on algorithms to reach conclusions and predict what kind of emails will resonate the most with the subscribers.
Let’s take a look at some statistics that prove the effectiveness of AI.
- 61% of the people believe that AI is the most critical aspect of their data strategy.
- 30% of companies all over the world will be including AI in at least one of the sales processes by 2020.
- Talking about revenue, AI is expected to bring in $14 trillion additional revenue and 38% increase in profitability by the year 2035.
- Currently, 87% of AI users said that they are using AI or considering using it for sales forecasting and email marketing enhancement.
Conclusion
Keeping these email statistics in mind, brainstorm to figure out what would work well for your business. Start now to plan a winning email marketing strategy for this year. If you need help with getting emails and newsletters coded and designed for your campaigns, get in touch with us.
Very shortly this website will be famous amid all blogging people, due to
it’s good content