Email Marketing Benchmarks, Trends and Statistics

Email continues to be a strong marketing channel. Nearly 72 percent of consumers say emails are their number one choice in brand communication. Businesses are paying attention. Research predicts that 225.3 billion emails will be sent every day this year – which is a five percent increase from previous years. To cut through the clutter, marketers need to continually evolve their strategies to stay relevant among changing audiences.

New research by Yes Lifestyle Marketing digs into email marketing trends and statistics and strategies marketers should be implementing to find success. According to the report:

• New subscribers make up a greater portion of marketers’ email audience: New subscribers made up 6 percent of marketers’ subscriber base, up 8 percent year over year (YoY) and up 30 percent over the last three years.


• Open rates increased: The average open rate is now 16.1 percent, a 9 percent YoY increase and a 3 percent increase over the last two years.


• Click-to-Open rates are on the decline: The average click-to-open rate (CTO) is 8.9 percent, a 13 percent decrease YoY and a 22 percent drop over the last two years.


• Unique click rates dropped: The average unique click rate declined by 6 percent YoY and 20 percent over the last two years.


• Triggers lead to significant ROI: Triggers made up just under 7 percent of total campaigns, yet they generated almost 5 times the click rate, almost double the open rate, and almost triple the CTO rate of business-as-usual (BAU) emails.


• Day of the week matters: Saturdays garnered the highest conversion rates with 2.4 percent of all email clicks turning into a purchase, and this number jumps to 8 percent for triggered campaigns. Fridays saw the highest unique click and click-to-open rates.

The Value of Triggered Emails

Clearly, triggered emails bring significant value and ROI as they generate almost 5 times the click rate. Many marketers are using welcome emails as a standard practice (72%), but other types of triggered emails are also on the rise such as abandoned shopping cart and transactional emails in response to a purchase.

Personalized Communications Increases Open Rates and Reduces Unsubscribes

According to the research, open rates are also increasing, with the average open rate now at 16.1 percent, a 9 percent YoY increase and a 3 percent increase over the last two years. Personalized one-to-one marketing is key to increasing open rates and engagement.

This year, personalization is evolving even further into marketing to a “segment of one”. According to eMarketer, 70percent of people already expect a personalized experience.

Email personalization reduces unsubscribe rates and has a major impact on boosting revenue. A report by Silverpop found that 50 percent of consumers unsubscribe from an email list due to irrelevant emails. This impact of unsubscribes adds up to a loss of 60 percent in future lifetime value (LTV) (AgilOne). However, when emails are personalized, the average click-through rate is 2.5 times higher with an average increase of 5.7 in revenue.

Marketers who realize the full impact personalization can bring to the table are now experimenting with numerous data points to add value to their emails.

Brands have huge opportunities this year to engage with their customers and prospects through highly personalized, one-to-one email communications. Learn how to boost your cross-channel engagement with V12 Email, the largest repository of high-quality email addresses in the industry. The V12 Email database is a high quality, permission-based national file with over 200 million unique email addresses and input records at over 1.5 billion.

Source: B2C