**This help-file covers the year of 2012 but still remains as a good source for research and analysis.
This is a list of benchmarks, reports, documents, and online resources that can help you better understand email marketing and to reference/share with clients. Because most of this information was generated by other organizations (not ours, so we don't own it) - please remember to credit the source.
Benchmark Studies and Trend Reports
-bab59343-f95e-4c86-8df3-c609c626440a-_Return_Path_Email_Intelligence_Report.pdf Key Findings:
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ISPs and mailbox providers struggle with spam and abuse from their own networks, as well as from other ISPs, with internal spam complaints comprising 5% of all complaints, and 22% coming from other ISPs and mailbox providers.
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Marketing emails account for most “this is spam” complaints, 70% in fact, which explains the scrutiny some marketers see applied to their emails.
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Marketing emails account for only .03% of all unique domains seen by ISPs, but 18% of total email volume.
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Consumers give marketers permission to send them a lot of email. In fact, 29% of the email that reaches a user’s inbox is newsletters – nearly the same amount seen from direct messages and replies (“conversational” email).
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Less spam in the inbox is both a blessing and a curse for marketers. For emails that are delivered to the inbox, marketers overwhelmingly receive the most complaints– more so than dynamic IP addresses and compromised email accounts.
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North America saw inbox placement rates decline 3% to 82% in third quarter compared to the same time period last year. Europe experienced a 5% decline with inbox placement rates dropping to 84%. Latin America saw rates drop 11% to 69%, the largest decline in any region.
email-marketing-quarterly-benchmark-study-q1-2012.pdf The following report details the overall trends for the second quarter of 2012 as well as the key performance:
Email volume rose 10% in Q2 2012 compared to Q2 2011, continuing the growth trend we have seen in each quarter for the past 3 years.
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In general, open rates were very similar to the rates seen in Q2 2011.
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As we saw in Q1, click rates continued to decline year-over-year, but the pace of that decline appears to have slowed. While total click rates dropped
10% year-over-year, there was only a 0.6% drop from Q1 to Q2 2012. -
Transaction rates dropped from 0.11% to 0.10%, and revenue per email declined from $0.13 to $0.12. Most of the declines were in the Consumer,
and Business Product and Services verticals. Transaction rates remained unchanged for Multi-Channel Retailers, and their revenue per email increased from $0.13 to $0.14.This month in the "A Spotlight On" section we look at the Email/Social Media Connection
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Email and social media complement each other as a means to build a fan base, and as an email acquisition source for an ongoing, responsive
subscriber segment. -
‘Like us’, or ‘Follow us’ campaigns for Facebook and Twitter have become more popular in the past year, with 70% more brands now sending this type of campaign than in 2010.
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Pinterest is the newcomer, and is generating the highest open and click rates of any of the mailings asking subscribers to ‘Like us,' ‘Follow us’ or ‘Pin us’.
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Social campaigns featuring special offers for fans or followers or highlighting fan activities, such as fan favorites, have higher open and click rates than other promotional mailings.
StrongMail_Survey-Lifecycle-Trends-0611.pdfBest Practices, How-To's - General Email Marketing
Marketing Profs 7 Trends Changing Email and What to do About Them Guide MProfs_SevenTrendsChangingEmail_Guide_TPH7N.pdf
You may recall a couple of years back when some people augured the death of email. Social media, they said, was the game changer that would completely reshape how consumers communicate with each other and with brands. And with the proliferation of social media, they said, older technologies such as email would grow increasingly passé until they ultimately met their demise.
It doesn’t take much to see that they were wrong. Well, mostly.
They were certainly wrong about the collapse of email. And if that isn’t already apparent in your day-to-day as a marketer, it’s certainly substantiated by the following reports:
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92% of online adults use email—61% on a daily basis, according to Pew Internet Project research.
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Attitudes toward email marketing have improved, according to a Forrester Research study, which found that fewer consumers are deleting email marketing messages without reading them (59% in 2010 vs. 63% in 2008 vs. 73% in 2006).
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A whopping 74% of online adults prefer to receive corporate communica- tions via email instead of social media, direct mail, text messaging, or phone, according to research by Merkle (PDF).
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Email and search marketing retain the greatest influence on consumers’ online buying behaviors, according to a study by Forrester Research and GSI Commerce.
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89.2% of marketing managers say email remains as important or more important to their overall marketing strategy compared with two years ago, according to an EmailVision study.
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For 2012, more business leaders plan to increase spend on email marketing than any other channel, according to a study by StrongMail and Zoomerang.
Still, those email doomsayers were accurate on one extremely crucial point: Change is upon us.
2012_introduction_to_email_marketing_final.pdfBest Practices, How-To's - Specific Topic/Subject for Email Marketing
Email Subject Lines:
its-all-in-the-wording-wp.pdfThere are many techniques brands employ to capture a subscriber’s attention and initiate a conversation. Whether it is using the perfect imagery with the catchiest headline or precision targeting to a specific audience, every detail can be carefully orchestrated to entice a subscriber to engage with an email message. However, before a subscriber can explore the content of the email, there is one vital step that must be taken. He or she must decide to open the email. Hence, the subject line, which is often thought of as just a simple phrase, becomes a crucial component of email strategy.
From the moment an email is sent to a subscriber’s inbox, it occupies space with numerous other emails and looks, at a glance, the same as its neighbors. Each email contains a subject line with a simple sentence or phrase from a sender. While it is important to craft a subject line that matches your brand, what makes an email worthy of opening? Is it an offer the subscriber just can’t turn down or an intriguing remark that sparks curiosity?
There are a handful of ways to approach writing a subject line that will capture the attention of a given audience. Experian® CheetahMail® has defined these techniques and has classified them into four different categories. We’ve used this research to organize and study more than 1,000 promotional mailing subject lines.
It's all in the wording
- The four main categories are:
• Fun: Humor, puns, plays on words and provocative language are used tosurprise subscribers and keep them reading. - • Curiosity: Questions, riddles and unfinished thoughts evoke a sense of mystery, causing the subscriber to want to read more.
- • Direct: Clear and to the point, Direct messages use urgency, succinctness, promotions and price incentives.
- • Relationships: Subject lines help subscribers identify with the products by their association with some group or special interest. These can include social media, special events, member newsletters or group buying sites.
Email List Segmentation from Hubspot
Email Marketing for Revenue/Conversions/Sales
Charts, Stats, Graphs and Online Resources
1. 120-marketing-stats-charts-and-graphs.pdf
Websites with Email Marketing Resources
1. https://www.marketingcharts.com