By Bob West
Any time a group releases a new study, you have to wonder about the validity of the data, particularly when the study touts new ’email benchmarks.’ Well, if the study’s benchmarks are established by analyzing more than 5.4 billion emails sent in a 90-day period, the numbers probably have merit.
That’s the case with the figures in the “Consumer Purchase Behavior” study from Yesmail. And, while the study really focused on consumers’ use of technology for online purchasing, we’re more interested in the email engagement trends Yesmail identified in the B2B realm. The study (click here to download it) points out the following:
|
Study Finding |
Questions to Ask Yourself |
| Mobile opens now account for over 52% of all email opens, an 8% growth over Q2 2013. (The study claims about 46% of all B2B email opens are on a mobile device.) | How do the emails / enewsletters your company sends out look on different phones and tablets? Also, how does your site look, since any click-through activity occurring in more than half of your opens may well be on something other than a desktop / laptop computer? |
| An additional potential factor in this shift to mobile-only email viewership is the growing adoption of tablets and their increased use as the preferred type of device | Many companies have yet to make their site’s mobile optimization a priority, so you’re likely not behind your competition if you haven’t gone down this road yet. The question to ask is, When will do you this? |
| Marketers who sent between 3 and 7 emails per week continued to maintain the highest active subscriber rates. | Don’t miss the key point here: Companies that send more emails create more engagement with their list. Concerns about list fatigue are well founded, but they may also be too limiting. What is your company’s email strategy? What content can you use to send more worthwhile emails to your customers? |
Lastly, the Yesmail study offered a host of benchmark figures specific to the B2B world, which offer good measuring sticks for evaluating your own email program’s effectiveness:
- Delivery rate: 72.2%
- Open rate: 13.7%
- Unique click rate: 1.2% (This measures the number of different people who receive the email and click on at least one URL in it.)
The author is Director of Interactive Sales at Meister Media. Contact him at 440-602-9129 or [email protected] if you’d like to talk about improving the performance of your own email communications / marketing efforts.