Happy Monday, marketers! Let’s get the workweek off to a great start with some recent email- marketing news. Here we go:
Marketers sending fewer emails, but getting higher open rates
A recent SendGrid study shows that while the number of emails being sent by marketers is declining, open rates are heading in the other direction.
Amy Gesenhues reports on the survey, which looked at 50 billion emails from 100,000 senders in 25 industries, at Marketing Land.
“The average email send rate has dropped from 9.8 sends per month in 2016 to 8.1 in 2017,” she writes. However: “While send rates overall were down, open rates increased from 27.3 percent in 2016 to 30.6 percent this year. The click rate remained nearly the same — with a slight drop from 2.8 percent in 2016 to 2.5 percent in 2017.”
Gesenhues reports that the technology industry “saw one of the largest increases in open rates, growing from 38.6 percent last year to 72 percent in 2017.” In addition, emails from e-commerce companies rose this year.
The study results also provide further insight into the growing dominance of mobile. Last year, the same survey found that emails were primarily consumed on desktop devices in eight industries. But in 2017, “only two industries — insurance and government — remained desktop-dominant, highlighting the growth of mobile email consumption,” writes Gesenhues.
And although mobile consumption rose across all industries, the health and fitness industry was found to have the highest mobile consumption, at 74 percent.
Survey results indicates that free email addresses put consumer trust at risk
Is it worth investing in a unique email address for your business, rather than using a free one? The answer, according to the results of a recent survey, is a definite “yes.”
“Using the likes of Gmail to communicate with customers can lead to a lack of trust among consumers,” writes Helen Leggatt at BizReport, reporting on an Ignite survey. “While more than three quarters of consumers (77 percent) said they would trust companies using a website or email address registered to a business name, two-thirds (64 percent) said they see businesses who use free email account as less trustworthy,” she writes.
Not having a website also puts trust at risk. “While two-thirds (65 percent) of consumers said they trust a company with a website, just 17 percent could say the same of one without,” according to Leggatt. “Businesses that only had a Facebook or Twitter presence were seen as less trustworthy by 63 percent of consumers.”
Mondays and Fridays most-likely days for subject-line mistakes
A study by Boomerang of 250,000 campaigns sent by brands in 2016 that shows that mistakes in subject lines are most likely to occur in emails sent at the beginning and end of the week, reports Ayaz Nanji at MarketingProfs.
“Campaigns sent on Mondays have the most errors (spelling mistakes, grammatical issues, improper capitalization, etc.) in subject lines, on average,” Nanji writes. “Emails sent on Fridays have the second-most errors in subject lines, on average.”
Nanji adds that the analysis determined that emails with mistakes in their subject lines have a 14 percent lower average response rate than error-free messages.
The report was based on an analysis of 250,000 campaigns sent in 2016.
Email marketing seen growing throughout 2017
“Email will continue to grow in 2017, according to a new Email on Acid study that suggests a majority of marketers and developers will spend more resources on email marketing this year,” writes Jess Nelson at Email Marketing Daily.
The survey of 3000 individuals who work in email marketing found that “seventy-four percent of respondents planned to spend more time on their email marketing programs in 2017, while an even larger 87 percent of respondents planned to invest more money in their email budget,” he reports.
Nelson adds that most of the companies surveyed reported they spend an average of one to five hours developing an email campaign, and a third are planning to spend an additional 20 or more hours a month on email this year.
The study found that improved content and contextually relevant email experiences were marketers’ main goals for 2017, while interactive features were the year’s top trend. “Almost a third of respondents selected interactive features as the biggest email trend this year, followed by 19 percent of respondents who ranked contextual relevance as their top trend,” Nelson writes.
The study also served to confirm email marketing’s exceptional ROI.
“Email remains a strong revenue driver, according to the study, with a third of respondents asserting that they make $10 or more for every dollar spent on email marketing,” Nelson writes.
“This number would likely be higher, however, if a majority of respondents tracked engagement. Surprisingly, 52 percent of respondents did not track email engagement metrics.”