What’s the first thing you do when waking up? Grab your phone. After you browse all the social networks, you open your email and scroll through your mother’s forward of a work/life balance article, your dentist confirming that 8 a.m. appointment tomorrow, the pizza place offering up rewards for ordering twice in the past week…
Email is not only essential to the lives of many, but it’s also a powerful marketing tool. A recent report released by Acoustic covers all the important email marketing benchmarks from 2019. Since it’s like sixty pages long, we’ve pulled out all the important takeaways and made this amazing blog.
Open Rates
“Open rate” is the number of people who actually opened your email, divided by the number of people it was sent to. During 2019, the automotive industry holds the highest open rate at 48.2% and Media & Publishing has the lowest, with a mean of 19.5%. For all industries, every user that opens emails opens them approximately 1.6 times. The report dug deeper into these metrics and discovered that more people are using their mobile devices for general inbox maintenance. That means they quickly scroll through and bulk delete what they deem to be “useless” and save the remaining emails to be read later on their computers. That means that if you aren’t already designing emails with mobile in mind, you need to start doing that ASAP. Otherwise your email will get deleted with someone’s mom’s email.
Click Rates
“Click rate” is the number of people who clicked a link within your email, divided by the number of people who opened the email. During 2019, the United States saw a 20% increase from click rates in 2018, settling at a mean click rate of 3.6%. The automotive industry holds the highest CTR (click-through rate). Media & Publishing has the second highest CTR, but the lowest open rate of all industries. If you’re in media and you get someone to open your email, you’ll probably get a click. Want clicks? Start focusing on one call to action in every email. It makes things less confusing and more persuasive for your readers.
Structuring Your Emails
So how can you improve your emails to not only reach industry benchmarks, but to blow them out of the water? Here are a few tips we gathered from the data and our experience.
- Provide high-quality content. The user should be able to actually apply the info you give them or download and use the content included in your email. Make it worth their time, and they’ll come back.
- Simplify. Although we saw an increase in people viewing emails on their desktop, mobile is far from dead. It’s still the top contender. In fact, 44% of people open emails on mobile, 40% on webmail and only 19.3% desktop.
- Descriptive CTAs. Stray away from using generic call to actions like “Read More” or “Lean More.” Let the user know what they’re getting themselves into. Try: “View 2019 Email Marketing Takeaways” or “RSVP to the Basic Party!”
- Make it pretty. Elevate the visual aesthetic of your emails. It’ll make people want to open them (we’re looking at you, Starbucks). Of those who open your email, 68.7% are actually reading it. People are suckers for a gorgeous color palette and attractive photos, so use these to your advantage.
Use this data to help bolster your email marketing efforts for the rest of 2019. This will give you plenty of data to collect for your 2020 email marketing strategy.
If this all seems data-heavy and overwhelming to you, reach out to us today. Our team of digital nerds can help turn all this data into awesome results.
