In one of the most com­pre­hen­sive stud­ies of email met­rics to date, email mar­ket­ing ser­vice provider Mail­er­Mail­er has ana­lyzed data from more than 62,000 newslet­ter cam­paigns and more than 1 bil­lion indi­vid­ual emails in total across 2013. The analy­sis and result­ing insights are a must-read for any mar­keter look­ing to put togeth­er a win­ning email mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy.

For many years now, email mar­ket­ing has been a cru­cial chan­nel for con­sumer-fac­ing busi­ness­es. A new study from Mail­er­Mail­er, ana­lyz­ing data from 1.18 bil­lion emails, showed the chan­nel once again proved to be one of the most valu­able rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing chan­nels for busi­ness­es in 2013.

The find­ings tal­ly with wider research in the indus­try: accord­ing to the Direct Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion’s 2013 Sta­tis­ti­cal Fact Book, email cam­paigns earned an incred­i­ble 4,300 per­cent ROI — or $42.08 for every mar­ket­ing dol­lar spent. In addi­tion, a joint study by Adestra/Econsultancy revealed a sim­i­lar­ly healthy sta­tis­tic, with indi­ca­tions that email gen­er­at­ed rev­enues expe­ri­enced a pro­por­tion­ate growth of 28 per­cent in 2013. Busi­ness own­ers sin­gled out email mar­ket­ing as the most suc­cess­ful chan­nel for ROI – attribut­ing an aver­age of 23 per­cent of their total sales to the medi­um.

It high­lights a need for mar­keters to ensure their email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns are effec­tive and opti­mized, in order to gen­er­ate the best pos­si­ble rev­enues and con­ver­sions. Increas­ing­ly this means imple­ment­ing insights from big data analy­sis to bet­ter under­stand the way con­sumers are respond­ing to email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns.

Mail­er­Mail­er’s study cov­ered: open, click, click-to-open, and bounce rates for 34 dif­fer­ent indus­tries, and also explored areas such as sched­ul­ing, per­son­al­iza­tion, and sub­ject lines. It revealed met­rics and trends about email mar­ket­ing that make fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing for any mar­keter.

8 Email Marketing Insights: How, When Consumers Are Clicking

1. Open rates peak approx­i­mate­ly one hour after deliv­ery, and the major­i­ty of opens occur with­in a few hours of deliv­ery.
2. Open rates peak on Mon­days.
3. There is a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion between click rate and the num­ber of links in an email.
4. Sun­days expe­ri­enced the high­est click rates in Q1/Q2, whilst Fri­days expe­ri­enced the high­est click rates in Q3/Q4.
5. Mes­sages sched­uled for deliv­ery in the evening pro­duced the high­est open and click rates.
6. Mes­sages that fea­tured only per­son­al­ized con­tent expe­ri­enced the high­est open rates.
7. Some­what sur­pris­ing­ly, per­son­al­iza­tion in both the sub­ject line and mes­sage con­tent pro­duced the low­est open rates, but the high­est click rates.
8. Mes­sages with short sub­ject lines pro­duced the high­est open and click rates.

Personalization Improves Open And Click Rates, But Messages Must Provide Real Value To Consumers

Some of the most valu­able insights from the Mail­er­Mail­er study were in how the use of per­son­al­iza­tion in cam­paigns could improve a num­ber of email mar­ket­ing met­rics. Per­son­al­iza­tion includes, for exam­ple, the inclu­sion of a recip­i­en­t’s unique infor­ma­tion or iden­ti­fiers in either the sub­ject line or body of a mes­sage, such as first name, job title, or place of res­i­dence.

Over­all, per­son­al­iza­tion of email con­tent yield­ed the high­est aver­age open rate for all email cam­paigns, with 17.6 per­cent of all per­son­al­ized emails being opened. Cam­paigns with­out any per­son­al­iza­tion achieved a low­er email open rate of 11.4 per­cent. Sur­pris­ing­ly, sub­ject-line-only per­son­al­iza­tion result­ed in an even low­er open rate of 9.8 per­cent, and mes­sages with both types of per­son­al­iza­tion achieved just a 5.3 per­cent open rate.

It high­lights the impor­tance above all that email mar­keters per­son­al­ize their mes­sage con­tent in order to achieve healthy met­rics. While per­son­al­iza­tion of a mes­sage’s sub­ject line reduced open rates, the val­ue of per­son­al­ized emails has impor­tant val­ue in enhanc­ing a mes­sage’s click rate. Cam­paigns with­out per­son­al­iza­tion result­ed in a click rate of just 1.8 per­cent, around half of the fig­ure for per­son­al­ized emails which exceed­ed 3 per­cent. While the stats are slight­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry in that per­son­al­iza­tion can neg­a­tive­ly affect open rates, this should not under­mine the val­ue of the prac­tice.

The con­clud­ing sec­tion of the report pro­vides valu­able con­text to the find­ings. Name­ly, that the neg­a­tive met­rics around per­son­al­iza­tion may stem from pre­vi­ous prac­tices of email spam­mers, often using per­son­al­iza­tion to trick recip­i­ents into open­ing mes­sages. It has cre­at­ed a wari­ness amongst con­sumers of open­ing mes­sages with per­son­al­ized sub­ject lines.

Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, this alone should not put off email mar­keters from per­son­al­iz­ing email mes­sages as the strat­e­gy will like­ly become more effec­tive in forth­com­ing years, as the preva­lence of spam declines, and mar­keters lever­age data on audi­ences to serve mes­sages of rel­e­vant and use­ful con­tent. Rather than cam­paigns which imple­ment per­son­al­iza­tion tech­niques as a token ges­ture, mar­keters should ensure mes­sages are per­son­al­ized with con­tent that is both gen­uine­ly infor­ma­tive and use­ful for con­sumers spe­cif­ic needs.

Mobile Growth Continues

Many of the pos­i­tive email met­rics in 2013 are due to the con­tin­ued growth of mobile email usage. As the fol­low­ing graph from the Kno­tice Mobile Email Opens Report illus­trates, mobile email open rates climbed steadi­ly through­out 2013.

Mobile email closed 2013 with 51 per­cent of all opens. Addi­tion­al­ly, there is no indi­ca­tion that this trend will not con­tin­ue, mobile traf­fic con­tin­ues to grow, and ana­lysts at Cis­co expect an 11-fold increase in glob­al mobile data traf­fic by 2018.

Despite already com­mand­ing a major­i­ty of the share, only 47 per­cent of mar­keters report to hav­ing opti­mized their emails for mobile, with 61 per­cent pro­fess­ing to only hav­ing a “non-exis­tent” or “basic” strat­e­gy for email mar­ket­ing on mobile.

For 2014, above all mar­keters need to under­stand the impact mobile tech­nol­o­gy is hav­ing, and will con­tin­ue to have on email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. As Mail­er­Mail­er’s report indi­cates, ana­lyz­ing avail­able data to bet­ter under­stand and imple­ment a con­sumer-cen­tric mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy will be key.