Email Marketing Stats and Tips to Guide Your 2018 Strategies

As email marketers, we want our every strategy to be data-driven and not actual guesswork. That's why we dedicate our time to check the statistics so that we would know what works and what's not worth trying.

Statistics keep us updated on the trends surrounding the field of email marketing. It tells us which strategies have brought outstanding results to others so that we could adopt them. If we don't have enough internal data or history, statistics provide us industry benchmarks that we can use to compare our performance. These information can then help us form the appropriate strategy per campaign.

Numbers don't lie, they say. It can be used as the foundation of your plan and as a solid defense on why you decided with such strategy.

So, we took the pleasure to compile relevant email marketing automation statistics and join them with tips, which you can use to serve as your guide for your next strategy. With this in hand, we’re hoping you can come up with effective campaigns for your own businesses and brands. Be sure to bookmark this, so you could always go back to them.

Mobile Email

• 47% of people use a mobile device to check an email campaign on average, while 26.9% uses desktop and 26.1% uses webmail. (Vision6 Email Marketing Metrics Report)
• 40% of consumers said that their mobile phone is their primary device for checking email. (Email Monday)
• By the end of 2018, worldwide mobile email users are expected to total over 2.2 billion. (The Radicati Group)
• Mobile email will account for 20 to 75% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product, and email type. (Email Monday)

Tips

The mobile revolution has enabled customers to access email wherever they are on their smartphones and tablets. Make use of this reality and turn it to your advantage. As email marketers, it is our responsibility to optimize our emails on mobile to ensure a smooth reader experience when they access it on their mobile devices.

When creating your email, you can start by using short subject lines and single-column emails. For the body, use a minimum of size 14pt font and 22pt for headlines to avoid tiny fonts. Before hitting that send button, it would be best to test your emails on different devices and screen sizes.

Email Automation

• Transactional or triggered emails have 8x more opens and substantially greater revenue than regular bulk emails. (Experian)
• 63% of the “very successful” use their marketing automation systems extensively, while 37% achieved best-in-class status with limited use. (Three Deep & Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends for Success”)
• Over the next two years, an additional 21% of marketing leaders plan to use a marketing automation platform. (Salesforce)
• 63% of companies outsource all or part of marketing automation strategy planning. 51% use a combination of outsourced and in-house resources, 12% outsource all to a specialist. 37% use in-house resources only. – (Ascend2)
• The most important strategic goals of a marketing automation strategy are increasing lead generation (61%), lead nurturing (57%) and sales revenue (47%). (Ascend2)

Tips

Email automation provides a more holistic and integrated marketing approach to email marketers. To win this, follow different email automation best practices such as drip campaigns, social integration, personalization, proper list segmentation, mobile optimization, dynamic content, and more.

Choosing an email automation platform with advanced features is essential so that you could maximize what the technology has to offer and you can have diverse campaigns you can execute.

Email Personalization

• Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates. (Experian)
• Emails with personalized message content received a 5% lift in open rates compared to emails with no personalization. (Statista)
• 50% of companies feel they can increase interaction within email by increasing personalization. (Experian)
• Only 39% of online retailers send personalized product recommendations via email. (SmartrMail)
• Email list segmentation and personalized emailing were the most effective email strategies of 2017. (DMA)

Tips

While it's been established that personalizing emails is a profitable strategy, following the best practices still pays. Use customer data to know how to address your customers on a personal level. Putting their first name in email subject line is a good start, but you can improve this further by making use of their location, gender or age.

Email content also matters. Aside from using their names, maximize dynamic content to show images that would appeal to them the most based on what you know about them. Mix and match all of the information you know to come up with a plan that would best suit your database.

Mastering email marketing requires your full dedication to learn its dynamics even if it means drowning yourself with relevant statistics every day. If that’s what it takes to grow your business, then you should start devising strategies according to what these numbers tell you.