Roundup of July statistics on email marketing, we love a good stat!

OK, so as an email marketing company there’s no denying it, we’re always obsessed with stats related to the work we do on a day-to-day basis, it certainly helps our own activity.

However by sharing these latest email marketing statistics, hot off the press, and by performing our own research, I hope that businesses and individuals will be inspired to go and check out some email marketing solutions and use them to benefit their own work. 

I’ve looked at the latest data from sites such as the Email Stat Center, DMA, Marketing Sherpa and Email Marketing Reports to bring you all the best tidbits for some serious food for email comms type thought!

Image is everything, isn’t it?

Well when it comes to email, the answer to this age old conundrum isn’t clean cut, although these stats suggest that images are becoming less important to email recipients.  According to the latest research from MarketingSherpa / Email Stat Center (2010) only 33% of those surveyed have images in their email provider turned on by default.  This is a huge leap from 2006, when the figure was still 55%.  

In contrast to this, but perhaps not surprisingly, visual appeal is an important factor for retail customers, and accordingly HTML formatting was favoured by 95% in 2009, up from 86% in 2008. – E-Tailing Group / Email Stat Center (2010).  As online customers, it is understandably important for us to get the full picture of a potential purchase before parting with our hard earned cash.

85% of email marketing arrives as expected

It would appear that latest email marketing software is really cranking it up a notch as the latest email marketing statistics suggest that in Europe 85% of email arrives as expected, with 3.6% ending up in the ‘junk’ or ‘bulk’ folder, with only 11% not being delivered at all. – Return Path / Email Stat Center (2010).  Good news for all us email marketers I’m sure you will agree.

With 75% of daily social media users saying that email is the best way for companies to communicate with them, compared to 65% of all email users – MarketingSherpa / Email Stat Center (2010), these stats certainly emphasise the importance of email marketing integration with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. 

Use your email marketing software features they say

We all like a bargain so it is unsurprising that the top three types of subject that compel subscribers to open emails contain one of the following: ‘Discount Offer,’ ‘Free Product Offer,’ or a familiar brand name – MarketingSherpa / Email Stat Center (2010). The Pure360 gang can also reveal that 42.6% of financial emails were opened after lunch, indicating that workers are more receptive to so-called ‘bigger-picture’ or life-changing messages in the afternoon.  

So what can what can we take away from all these stats?  Well, your email marketing software could help you out with reacting to them with features such as subject line tester; where you can send to multiple subject lines to see which generate the best open results, and intelligent time sender (ITS) for the best possible timings of your emails.