Fascinating Facts About Email Marketing - This Is A Long List You Might Want to Save
I figure this should spark some discussion.
I've got some pretty sizable lists (over 100K each), and I was doing some marketing research this week about the latest metrics (facts and figures about email marketing performance) in order to plan strategy for 2010.
Not all of the following references have their source notated, but generally they are from credible sources like Marketing Sherpa and Forester Research.
There were some real eye openers in this list....
Enjoy.
23% of emails that marketers sent to Gmail addresses did not reach the inbox
75% of respondents say lack of relevance is the biggest reasons subscribers choose to opt out, followed closely by sending too frequently (73%)
Between the U.S. and Canada, more than 20% of commercial, permission-based email doesn't reach the inboxes of intended subscribers. - Return Path (2009)
On average, 27.6% of commercial emails sent to business addresses don't reach the inbox. - Return Path (2009)
U.S. deliverability rates are slightly better than Canada with an average of 82% inbox placement rate. - Return Pat
So-called legitimate servers with even one spam-trap hit saw their delivery rates plummet to 38% on average
Ps that were listed on just one of the top 12 blacklists saw their delivery rates plunge to an average of 35%
Just 20% of email comes from legitimate servers, or servers that are "real, static" and "well configured". - Return Path (2008)
30% of practicing marketers don't take the time to figure out their actual rate of delivery. -
12% of practicing marketers have no idea how to characterize their organization's precise definition of delivery
38.4% of email marketers think that AOL has the lowest deliverability.
7.1% of email marketers think that Google's Gmail had the lowest.
- Dot Email (2007)
17% of email marketers thought Earthlink had bad delivery and 16 percent thought it was Yahoo according to the poll.
16% of permission-based emails are still being directed straight to a junk or bulk folder
SBC Global and Bell South both junk 30% of permission-based email
Yahoo junks 26% of permission-based email.
MSN Network, GMail and Hotmail all junk of permission-based email at 18%
Marketers sending to European ISPs face even more trouble: More than 20 percent of permission-based emails were sent to the junk/bulk folder - almost three times more than the previous quarter.
Use Text-Only if You're Emailing BellSouth Names
Spam filtering is more likely to occur because of HTML coding than the words you use in your email
21% of the emails reviewed appeared completely blank when images were turned off, or stripped inside a variety of email clients.
28% showed relevant copy, but had no working links. - Email Experience Council survey of 1,000 B2B and B2C emails
Utilizing a professional company and/or their tools to test your image rendering across multiple email clients often helps to increase response up to as much as 87%.
MarketingSherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006 reports what email client consumers are using
AOL - 20%
Yahoo! - 19%
Outlook Express - 15%
Hotmail - 12%
64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices, according to new data. - MarketingSherpa, in partnership with SurveySampling (2007)
Fewer than 50 percent of marketers create emails that render appropriately.
- Email Experience Council (Jan 2007)
One in five emails are invisible and ineffective due to blocked images.
Spam filtering is more likely to occur because of HTML coding than the words you use in your email.
Gmail users are most engaged with marketing emails (30.9% average open rate and 7.4% average click rate) while AOL users are the least engaged (20.1% average open rate and 4.3% average click rate).
12.5% of unique marketing emails were opened in the second half of 2008
Emails that had only the subject line personalized (12.4% Open Rate & 1.7% CTR) did worse than those with no personalization at all (13.5% Open Rate & 2.7% CTR).
Open rates were highest on Mondays, Tuesdays, and the weekends.
Emails with shorter subject lines significantly outperformed emails with longer subject lines. - MailerMailer (2008)
Emails with 20 or more links got about twice as many clicks as those with fewer links. - MailerMailer (2008)
Wednesday was the best day of the week in the third quarter of 2007 to send email in terms of click (3.9%) and open rates (25.4%). - eROI (2007)
Average open rates on Tuesdays were 22.6% and clicks were 3.2%; open rates on Thursdays were 23.6% while click rates were 3.7%; open rates on Friday were 23.1% and clicks were 3.1%; and open rates on Sunday were 20.7% while clicks were 2.4%. - eROI (2007)
Open and click rates tend to build throughout the workday and then drop and then spike in late evening. - eROI (2007)
Half of all consumers surveyed have made a purchase as a result of an email solicitation, and 16% did so from messages found in their spam folders.
24.2% of web merchants have an email open rate greater than 25%;
2.8% have open rates of 19.1% to 25%;
13.5% have open rates of between 15.1% and 19%;
17.4% have open rates of from 5.1% to 15%;
11.4% have open rates of between 1% and 5%;
20.8% don't know or say their open rate is less than 1%. - Internet Retailer (2007)
17.1% reported email click-through rates of 15.1% or more;
51.8% report click-through rates of 2.51% to 15%;
10.3% report click-through rates fewer than 2.5%;
20.8% that don't know their click-through rates. - Internet Retailer (2007)
Eighty-four percent of consumers surveyed reported clicking through relevant email offers. - Epsilon (2007)
Free shipping is the No. 1 offer that customers look for and will respond to in an email, per online marketing firm.
31 percent of people surveyed prefer a percentage off, with only 22 percent favoring a dollar amount off. - eROI Inc
Email marketing consultants consider an open rate of about 20% and a click-through rate of 4% to 5% to be a highly effective email campaign.
16% of mobile users' permission-based email is viewed on mobile devices - five points higher than last year
48% of respondents don't use preview panes when viewing the majority of their permission emails
89% of retailers cited email is the most mentioned successful tactic overall.
42% percent of email marketers do not know their return on investment from email marketing
Subscribers who receive promotional permission-based email estimate that they delete 55% without opening.
49% of marketers deem email to third-party lists as a low-ROI tactic. - MarketingSherpa "2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide"
Most email clients now allow up to 100 characters to be visible, compared to previous truncated space of 40 characters.
Daily email messages ranked with pop-up advertisements as the most damaging online tactics to a company's online reputation.
64% of all marketers in the study used a single opt-in tactic.
31% of companies surveyed use a homegrown application for their email marketing needs. - JupiterResearch "Maturation of Email: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization" (2007)
Email is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7, compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs. - Shop.org, State of Retailing Online 2007 report
The average marketer sends 64 messages to their customers a year.
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