By Lisa Merriam
AMA New York Board of Directors
Email marketing effectiveness is a proven fact. One of the older forms of digital marketing, email marketing continues to outperform all other tactics by a factor of four to one. There may be 3.5 billion people using social media around the world, but the latest statistics on active email users tops 3.9 billion.
Email remains the king of return on investment. eMarketer’s recent study pegged its media ROI at 122%. A less ambitious number from Constant Contact puts email ROI at $38 for every $1 spent, but still well ahead of other digital marketing tactics.
And that is likely to grow with email usage growing year over year–up to 3% annually from 2018 to 2023, according to Statista. It is no wonder that 43% of businesses surveyed by The Manifest are increasing their marketing spend on email marketing this year. Here are some email marketing effectiveness statistics to consider:
- The average work email account receives 126 emails a day, an email volume statistic that has gone up 5% a year since 2015.
- A huge amount of that email is considered spam. As tracked by Spam Laws, 60 billion emails are categorizes as junk emails.
- Today more emails are opened on mobile devices that desk tops, though it varies by industry. 38% are mobile opens in the Schools & Education industry, whereas in Leisure, Sports & Recreation, 60% are opened on mobile, according to the IBM 2018 Marketing Benchmark Report.
- Some 82% of workers open emails outside of work hours, with 33% checking hourly or even more often. It is possible that weekends have the best open and click rates.
- Frequency is thorny issue. 45.8% of recipients cited too frequent emails as the reason they unsubscribed. The book “Frequency Matters: The Keys to Optimizing Email Send Frequency” tracks a .37 read rate at one time a week, but less than half that at 7 times a week.
To boost the impact of your digital marketing spending, here are the key take-aways on email marketing effectiveness:
- If you can only afford to do one thing with your marketing resources, using email marketing is the way to go.
- With crowded inboxes, it is more important than ever to stand out and offer something recipients actually want.
- If your email isn’t mobile friendly, you are cutting out perhaps half of your audience.
- Consider sending business emails on evenings and weekends when workers are less harried.
- Test what frequency works best for you. Start low and slowly build, backing off when your read rate starts to dip.
