email in numbers
Email is still the most effective of all marketing instruments, we all know that. According to US research institute Radicati, there will be more than 5 billion email addresses in use worldwide by 2018. Email rules in B2B marketing, and although social media and instant messaging are making headway in B2C communication, it remains an indispensable channel to contact your clients.
Email is a proven technology, and more tools to make optimal use of this cheap and effective channel become available each day.
The Dutch Data Driven Marketing Association (DDMA) published its yearly benchmark on June 15th, 2017. This benchmark is based on data from over 4,7 billion emails, sent by Dutch companies and organizations between January and December 2016, in a total of 185.000 campaigns. This figure has increased by 8%, compared to last year.
Notable takeaways from 2017’s benchmark
1 Smaller campaigns get more clicks. The smallest campaign size of 500-1000 gets 9,67% more clicks than the average.
Conclusion: Tempt your client to click in your mail with a small, highly personalized campaign. Also, lower the frequency: A maximum of 10 campaigns a year will yield an above average COR, CTR, and CTO.
2 Only 37% of emailers use dynamic content in their mails. However, figures show that this technique improves click ratios by 0,7 to 3%!
Conclusion: Start using dynamic content right away. This has gotten a lot easier with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence to marketing automation platforms.
3 The number of emails that are opened on mobile devices keeps rising, from 36% in 2015 to 40% in 2016. This is the figure for all sectors combined. If we look further into the data for specific sectors, we see that mobile opens in sectors like Hotel&Catering (61%), Leisure (58%) and eCommerce (53%) are even higher. Mobile opens occur most frequently outside office hours during the week, and at the weekend. It is likely that the mobile devices used are mostly smartphones because the popularity of tablets seems to be waning.
Conclusion: using non-responsive designs for email is a waste of time and money. Two-thirds of all emails sent are already responsive, but there is room for improvement with the final third. When testing your designs, concentrate on the most common operating systems and smartphones.
More facts and figures and sector-specific results can be found in the DDMA Dutch Email Benchmark. You can download it here in Dutch and English.
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