LATEST EMAIL STATS: Hot off the press

Being such an email geek, I love anything that is related to email stats and what is and isn’t working in emails. EmailStatCentre.com have just sent through there latest email with an overview of what is new and interesting. Have a look at the top email stats that have just been released.

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WHAT DO THESE EMAIL STATS MEAN? (executive cheat sheet)

• People are receiving more email communications from companies, irrespective of the age
• More people are using their phones to open and read their email messages and it is continuing to increase in both frequency of checking mobile messages and time spent doing so
• Mobile email users are more likely to read and open these emails and engage with brands on social networks (all via their mobile)

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WHAT ARE THESE EMAIL STATS? (detailed read)

• In 2010, 30% of total email time was devoted to commercial emails, compared to 17% in 2005. (Merkle)
• 90-100% of Millennials (Ages 18-33) engage in email as an online activity. (Pew Research Center)
• 90% of adults internet users in every age group subscribed to emails from brands, while significantly fewer “liked” companies on Facebook or followed them on Twitter. (ExactTarget)
• 78% of mobile email users are also regular users of social networking sites. – Merkle “View From the Digital Inbox 2011” (2011)

Here are some interesting email on mobile stats (reference):

• 78% of mobile email users are also regular users of social networking sites. – Merkle “View From the Digital Inbox 2011” (2011)
• 43% of mobile email users check email four or more times per day, compared to 29% of those who do not use mobile email. – Merkle “View From the Digital Inbox 2011” (2011)
• 55% of those with an Internet-enabled mobile phone use it to check their personal email account. – Merkle “View From the Digital Inbox 2011” (2011)
• 13.36% of emails are opened by a mobile operating system or device. – Knotice (2011)
• 8.74% of emails are opened on an iPhone, compared to 2% on an iPad, 1.9% on an Android, and 0.15% on a Blackberry. – Knotice (2011)
• 25% of Australian Small and Medium Sized Enterprises are using mobile email as of June 2010, Mobile email also has the highest increase between June 2009 – June 2010 with a 47% increase. – The Australian Communications and Media Authority (2010)
• 85% of smartphone users check their email on their smartphones (e.g. read the subject line and from address), and 82% actually read their email on their smartphone. – ExactTarget (2009)
• Only 31.6% of US marketers said having an optimized mobile marketing experience for customers is important. – eROI “The Current State of Social, Mobile, & Email Integration” (2010)
• 45 percent of mobile users stated the best time for companies to send e-mail is only when it is necessary as compared to 39 percent of their non-mobile peers. e-Dialog “Manifesto for E-mail Marketers: Consumer Demand Relevance” (2010)

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Stay tuned, more stats and interpretation to come.

Dominique Hind

 

iPhone 4 welcome email – I’m in shock!

DISCLAIMER: I’ve been meaning to write this post since I received this email in August 2010.

I got my iPhone 4 when it first came out and registered it immediately, but I was shocked when I actually received an email from Apple about how to use the phone and the new features. For all of the Apple products I’ve purchased (there have been a few….), this was the first product and related welcome email that I’ve received about enhancing my experience with the iPhone. I didn’t even get one when I purchased their server product – which is definitely more involved and tricky than the iPhone.

So you could imagine how happy I was when I received this. I clicked straight through to look at what was different and expore the landing page. See the email and the landing page below.

Apple iPhone4 - Welcome email - August 2010

Apple iPhone4 - Welcome landing page - August 2010

LEARNINGS:
There are a few learnings that can be taken away from this Apple example:

1. WELCOME EVERYONE – the best experience anyone can have is to be welcomed to a brand, service or product they have just purchased and taken the time to register. If you are selling anything, you should ensure that you are sending an email that will provide the user or your new customer with some information about how they can get the most of their recent purchase. You already have all of the information for the selling, it is just completing the process and reusing it so you are continuing the sales process in the iniital few weeks of their purchase.
2. CHECK IN – an enhancement to what Apple are doing would have been to send a survey a month after purchase to see how I was doing with the phone, specifically looking at how I’m using it, what I’m using the phone for, the good, areas for improvement and any other enhancements. This is the perfect testing ground for future new product development and a cheap market research for the company.
3. ONGOING UPDATES – Apple are starting to get better at this, but there are still areas they can improve. Any updates to the software should be communicated via email rather than just via iTunes. For the bigger updates, Apple are communicating with there consumers, but the smaller ones are a self discovery.

 

Overall, I was very happy that Apple sent this email. Let’s just ensure that they continue on this process and welcome new people/customers to all of their products moving forward.

 

ASSOCIATED APPLE & EMAIL MARKETING POSTS I’VE WRITTEN:

• Apple does local area marketing (LAM) – OMG!
• Air NZ email update – simple, but I love it
• T2 – the best tea, but the worst newsletter program (emails)
• How companies are recognising customer’s birthday? Sephora email
• How to make an email look great but work from a template – Air NZ
• What’s working in emails? MailerMailer email marketing report (June 2009)
• Who has the best designed emails? Air NZ
• How to make the most of email templates? J.Crew
• Do you need a welcome? J.Crew thinks so
• How to encourage sales by email? Bluefly
• What else could Apple be doing in their emails?

Who is winning the webmail war? Yahoo! followed by AOL (US stats)

This is a really short post, but I really like this graph showing who is winning the US webmail war. It looks at the average visits per visitors, the average minutes per visitor and the total unique visitors. The information comes from ComScore via The New York Times.

Based on the total unique visitors,  Yahoo! is winning hands down. Hotmal/Live and AOL are neck and neck with Google coming forth.

Based on the average visits per visitor, Yahoo! and AOL are neck and neck.

Based on the average minutes per visitor, Yahoo! is a clear leader followed by AOL.

Webmail statistics - US based (May 2009)

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RELATED POSTS

• What’s working in emails? MailerMailer email marketing report (June 2009)
• Who has the best designed emails? Air NZ
• How to make the most of email templates? J.Crew
• Do you need a welcome? J.Crew thinks so
• How to encourage sales by email? Bluefly
• What else could Apple be doing in their emails?
• Overview of Apple’s email marketing
• What are the commen elements in Apple’s emails?
• Why does everyone love Apple’s emails?
• How many emails is too many? Qantas Frequent Flyer, Air NZ and Apple
• What questions to ask consumers to tailor email communications?
• What are email best practices?
• How to ensure subscribers see HTML emails?
• What & when retailers send emails? Tesco, Coles & ALDI
• Coles Supermarket – great email communications & templates

What’s working in emails? MailerMailer email marketing report (June 2009)

I’ve just found a great email marketing report from MailerMailer (published June 2009) that provides an overview of what is happening with email stats for emails sent through their system. I’d recommend a quick skim over the report, but if you don’t have time I’ve done it for you (see summary and key stats below).

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WHAT DOES THE REPORT SAY?

Most people will open their emails in the first 24hrs, but only a small percentage will click through to the content (less than 3%). It’s best to send emails on a weekend or Monday with a subject line under 35 characters. Personalisation needs to be more than just the subject line.

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WHAT ARE THE STATS?

As a top line summary, here are the key findings:

1. How Soon Do People Open Their Email?
74.5% of opens occur within the first 24 hours and 84.3% occur within the first 48 hours.

2. Open Rates
The overall unique open rates stand at 12.52% which is a marginal decline from the 13.20% open rate experienced in the first half of 2008.

3. Click Through Rates
Click rates held steady. Subscriber clicks in the second half of 2008 were comparable to those in the previous six months, rising a mere 0.08%.

4. Best Days to Send
Though weekends and the beginning of the week outperform the other days, Monday is the clear winner having both the highest open rate and click rate.

5. Subject Lines
Yet again, emails with subject lines shorter than 35 characters were opened more than emails with subject lines longer than 35 characters.

6 .Personalization
Personalization can be good. Data shows when only the message is personalized, there are more opens and clicks. However, emails with only the subject line personalized garnered the least amount of opens and clicks.

7. Deliverability
For the second year now, deliverability continues to increase and bounces continue to decrease. This means more messages are reaching recipients’ inbox.

8. Number of Recipients
Messages delivered to small and medium lists have far greater open and click rates than messages delivered to lists containing 1000 or more subscribers. A smaller list does not directly affect open and click rates, but mailings to smaller lists may be targeted better, contain more relevant content or have more recent subscribers.

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WHO HAS THE BEST OPEN & CLICK THROUGH RATES?
Here are the trends in open rates and click through rates by day, you can see that Sunday and Monday are the most popular.

Email Open & Click Through Rates

In previous reports, it has been recommended to send emails on Tuesday at around 11am. Obviously this trend has changed.

Having a look at the click through rates by industry shows that religious and spiritual emails have the highest click through and travel related emails are next.

Email Click Through Rates by Industry

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WHAT WORKS IN SUBJECT LINES?
Below is a word cloud of the most popular subject lines. They centre around news, party, free, holiday, weekend and night.

Popular Subject Lines in Emails

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DOES PERSONALISATION MATTER?
It’s interesting to look at personalisation and how it effects open rates and click through rates.

Email Open & Click Through Rates based on Personalisation

Key take out is that you need to do more than just personalise the subject line.

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HOW MANY LINKS MATTERS?
The more links in an email that subscribers can click through to, the more likely they are to click through. I know it sounds pretty straight forward, but not sure if I would want over 20 links in an email just to encourage me to click through.

Email Click Through Rates based on number of Links

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RELATED POSTS:

• Who has the best designed emails? Air NZ
• How to make the most of email templates? J.Crew
• Do you need a welcome? J.Crew thinks so
• How to encourage sales by email? Bluefly
• What else could Apple be doing in their emails?
• Overview of Apple’s email marketing
• What are the commen elements in Apple’s emails?
• Why does everyone love Apple’s emails?
• How many emails is too many? Qantas Frequent Flyer, Air NZ and Apple
• What questions to ask consumers to tailor email communications?
• What are email best practices?
• How to ensure subscribers see HTML emails?
• What & when retailers send emails? Tesco, Coles & ALDI
• Coles Supermarket – great email communications & templates

Who has the best designed emails? Air NZ

I hate to say it but airline newsletters are boring. All they focus on are pushing deals and deals with little or no personality included. This is true for all airlines except Air New Zealand.

It doesn’t matter if it is a domestic or international email/offer, every piece of communication has been designed really well. There are elements of every email that are the same, but each have their own idea and design, all represented in the email header (see screens below).

Air NZ Domestic Sale Take Off email

Air NZ Domestic Deals email

Air NZ Gotta Go Domestic Deals email

Air NZ Gotta Go Domestic Deals email 2

Air NZ Get Packing email (holiday deals)

Air NZ Great Aussie Deals emails

Air NZ Best of the West email

Air NZ Quick Aussie Escapes email

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OBSERVATIONS:

• Email header: all emails provide the ability to view the email online or to manage your email preferences.
• Preview pane: the most important part of the email is what is visable in the preview panel. This is what will encourage consumers to click through. The preview panel of each of the above emails is very engaging and encourages opens.
• Logo: the Air NZ logo appears on the top left-hand side of every email. The only exception is for the holiday deals email (see above Get Packing example).
• Headline driven: each of the email is headline driven. All of the headlines relates to the offer or element that is being promoted in the email.

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Stay tuned for more Air NZ email review posts. They are coming through soon.

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RELATED POSTS:

• How to make the most of email templates? J.Crew
• Do you need a welcome? J.Crew thinks so
• How to encourage sales by email? Bluefly
• What else could Apple be doing in their emails?
• Overview of Apple’s email marketing
• What are the commen elements in Apple’s emails?
• Why does everyone love Apple’s emails?
• How many emails is too many? Qantas Frequent Flyer, Air NZ and Apple
• What questions to ask consumers to tailor email communications?
• What are email best practices?
• How to ensure subscribers see HTML emails?
• What & when retailers send emails? Tesco, Coles & ALDI
• Coles Supermarket – great email communications & templates

Why does everyone love Apple’s newsletters?

Whenever we ask a client for a competitor/company who is doing email marketing well or someone they aspire to be like, most answer with Apple. Not sure if this is because most companies what to be like Apple or whether they really are the cutting edge of email marketing. Keep reading if you want to know more.

The common reasons why Apple are perceived to be doing emails well are:

1. Design: a combination of beautiful imagery and a lot of white space
2. Content: it is always relevant to the consumer, single minded (about one product or event) and short
3. Exclusive: you feel like you are part of the Apple club as soon as you receive anything

Apple have a fluid approach to sending emails and their frequency. There is no rigid structure or routine to their sends, ie there isn’t a monthly newsletter about a collection of products. Their approach is to send an email focusing on one product, highlighting the features of that product with strong calls to action. They may send between 3 – 4 emails in a month depending on their NPD cycle.

Apple Emails - 15 January - 20 April 2009

A summary of the number of emails sent:

• January: 3 emails (2 x software, 1 x event: Valentines)
• February: 1 email (1 x product)
• March: 4 emails (3 x product, 1 x event: uni)

What do Apple do well?

• Frequency: Apple don’t have a set frequency of communications. When they have something of interest they send it out, they don’t wait to fill a monthly newsletter.
• Focus: the emails are focused on one product or event. They don’t try to include too many products into the email or tell the consumer too much. There is a focus on providing enough information about a product and then pushing consumers through to the website to find out more.
• Strong CTA: at the bottom of every email there are strong calls to action that are consistent across all areas (see screen shots below). There are two elements: shop online and come in store.
• Design: all emails have been designed so that all the information is displayed on screen if a user has opened the email. A post on this is in progress and will be live in the next few days.
• Preview: there is enough information displayed in the preview window to encourage a user to open the email. Most emails have a headline and a strong email to encourage this. A post on this is in progress and will be live in the next few days.

STRONG CTA

Apple Call to Action - 31st December email

Apple iMac Call to Action - product email

Apple iPod Call to Action - product email

Apple MacBook Call to Action - product email

Apple MacMini Call to Action - product email

COMMON ELEMENTS

There are several commen elements within these calls to action:

• Two boxes: there are always two boxes. One promoting online shopping and the other promoting coming in store. Both pushing the consumer to make a purchase
• Imagery: whether it is human or iconic, there is some consistency to the imagery used throughout the calls to action. It looks as if Apple have a standard way of using the in store ‘Specialist’, far right. The first example above was used in one of the product bundling emails.
• Consistency: every email is pushing these two calls to action. The copy may change, but they are really saying the same thing just making it relevant for the product they are promoting.

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LEARNINGS

There are three key learnings that companies can take from Apple:

• Be focused: don’t try to put everything in one email. If there isn’t a topic/theme to hold all products together it isn’t worth forcing it. Be single minded and manage content around a topic/theme. If something doesn’t work this month, try it again next month.
• Understand your audience: don’t box yourself in to sending a monthly email, know what products your customers have and talk to them personally. Use them to gauge how often they want to receive communications from them and get their feedback into what they actually want to receive.
• Set rules: rather than setting rules based on frequency, set them based on content and themes. It isn’t essential to send a monthly newsletter, but it is to communicate regularly. What are your rules around communication?

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RELATED EMAIL POSTS

• How many emails is too many? Qantas Frequent Flyer, Air NZ and Apple
• What questions to ask consumers to tailor email communications?
• What are email best practices?
• How to ensure subscribers see HTML emails?
• What & when retailers send emails? Tesco, Coles & ALDI
• Coles Supermarket – great email communications & templates

What & when retailers send emails? Tesco, Coles & Aldi

After looking through my blog stats, I found that two of the most popular posts have been about the Tesco and Coles emails. So I thought I would look at the other retailers emails I receive and see if there is anything else of interest.

When looking at my archive of retailers emails (Aldi, Coles, Tesco), it was interesting looking at the summary of the emails and when they had been sent, the collective subject lines and the file size.

ALDI LEARNINGS

1. Subject lines: ALDI have only recently updated their subject lines to be more meaningful – rather than being ‘upcoming ALDI special buys’ they include the email focus and the date they were sent.
2. Timings: ALDI always send their emails on a Friday. They are not sent at a consistent hour, but they are sent between 12 – 5pm.
3. Email size: The file size of the emails are between 41 – 52Kb, which is a reasonable file size.

ALDI Email Overview (AU)

It seems that ALDI are starting to pay more attention to the emails they send out to consumer (opted-in base). The focus is more on the subject lines than the creative. Unfortunately the emails are still extremely long, don’t have any personalisation, include too many different categorise and no segmentation (see example below).

ALDI Email - 18 September 2008

COLES LEARNINGS

1. Subject lines: Coles don’t have any consistency with their subject lines. They don’t include Coles or a common theme between them.
2. Timings: Coles doesn’t have a strategy around their email send times.  There is no consistent day or time that their emails are sent meaning that they are a surprise when they arrive in consumers inbox.
3. Email size: The file size of the emails are between 25 – 50Kb, which is a huge variation. The latest emails are reducing in file size (high 20s), which is great because it means they are quick to download (not including images).

Coles Email Overview (AU)

Coles have two different email databases. One for promoting their weekly specials and the other for promoting their special feature newsletters and sections: Pets and seasonality (spring).

Coles eNews Overview - Special Interest Newsletters

TESCO LEARNINGS

1. Subject lines: Very consistent and always include Tesco in the subject line.  Most subject lines are quite short (under 50 characters), no matter what the email is.
2. Timings: Tesco doesn’t have a strategy around their email send times. Tesco have so many different emails they send out. There may be some thought around each email, but it doesn’t look that way.
3. Email size: The file size of the emails vary between 19 – 62Kb, which is a huge variation. The ‘Top Offers of the Week from Tesco.com’ are the biggest emails.

Tesco Email Overview (UK)

LEARNING SUMMARY

There are a few things that need to be considered before you send out emails/newsletters on random days and at random times.

• Think about the subject line. Anything with less than 50 characters gets a higher click through rate than those with long subject lines.
• Think about when the emails are sent. Is the key to be focused on a time, day or date? Whatever is decided it must be maintained and enforced no matter what.