Each year Twilio SendGrid publish a new Email Benchmark and Engagement study based on the emails sent through their systems.
That’s roughly 60 million emails per month sent out by 80,000 of their customers.
To see how email marketing in 2019 performed, they also looked at email from the perspectives of recipients – to learn in more detail how they engage with email.
The study is available to read here.
But here are a few of the highlights:
This table shows that as the number of emails to recipient inboxes increases, the email engagement drops.
The average number of emails per month sent to recipients increased to 8.3 in 2019.
This corresponds with the drops in Aggregate Open Rate, Aggregate Click Rate, and Click-to-Open Rate.
This is interesting because pretty much everyone who teaches an email marketing course advises that you should sent out emails every day rather than about 1 every 3 days as this study shows marketers are doing.
So, for people who send daily, this suggests that all rates should be lower (more emails = lower engagement).
Open rate for broadcast emails I send out is in the 6% range, quite low in comparison to the figures in the table.
But I do sent out more than 8 emails per month.
My Aggregate Click Rate is between 0.5% and 1%.
But my Click To Open Rate is 12%.
Using good subject lines on emails is vitally important in increasing open rates and so I can see that I need to come up with better subject lines for my own emails.
For even more global benchmarks, including the top inbox providers and devices used in the top 25 countries that SendGrid send email to, download the full 2019 Email Benchmark and Engagement Study.
Other useful email statistics relate to the type of content you send to your subscribers.
So, what kind of emails should you be sending out?
Image-only emails, image-heavy emails, image-light or no image emails?
And how much text content is best?
These are the results from surveying email recipients:
The results are very clear…
Emails should contain between a couple of sentences and up to, at most, 4 paragraphs of text.
Image-only emails are a no-no as are walls of text.
So maybe it’s time to change some of your email marketing strategies and rework some of the emails you’re sending out, especially if you’re doing any email marketing automation.
Small and badly formatted text also annoys people who read emails on mobile devices.
I use a 16px text size in my emails, but I’m switching to using a 18px sized font from now on.
The full 2019 Email Benchmark and Engagement Study is filled with even more great data that you can use to improve your email campaign.
As well as the charts above, the study includes more granular data on how participants across 4 different age groups in the U.S. and U.K. responded to dozens of email questions.
Within the full report, you’ll learn:
- How many images recipients want to see in their emails
- What frequency of messages they’d like to receive
- What elements of emails influence their decision to click on links
- What frustrates them about the email experience
With more than 50 different charts showing how recipients responded to dozens of email questions, the Study is an essential resource for any email sender.
All the best,
Gary Nugent
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Follow me (@garynugentmentoring) on Instagram
P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:
Hi Gary, this was a great article for us internet marketers and you did the work 🙂
I, for example, can see myself in those numbers and statistics… I hate getting emails every day from some of the marketers out there and after a while, they end up in the trash.
I know what you mean, Andreas. I get about 300 emails a day from various marketers. Some are from lists I’ve signed up to. Others are from marketers whose products I’ve bought.
I don’t have the time to read them all (who would?).
So I quickly scan the subject lines and only open the emails that at least pique my interest, which is probably 3-5% of those emails.
And most of those that I do open, I quickly scan to see what they’re about and only in a tiny fraction of cases do I actually click on the embedded link to see what they’re promoting.
So it shows just how important email subject lines are in getting people to open your emails.
I try to use related emojis in my own email subject lines so they stand out from all the other subject lines. One or two emojis at most.
Apparently, only 6% of email marketers use emojis at all!
You’ve got to train people to open your emails which is why it’s a good idea to send them at the same time, every day, and provide training or quality information most of the time and offers about a third of the time.
If an email marketer just sends out promotion after promotion, their subscribers will stop opening their emails.
So, not only is the marketer not making any sales, but they’re paying to have that subscriber stored in their autoresponder service and paying to send them emails.
That’s why it’s a very good idea to clean up your list about once a month.
Remove any people who’ve unsubscribed and any who haven’t opened your emails in the last month or two.
Doing this also improves your delivery rates so that those who are interested in reading your emails are more likely to see them.
This is very interesting and helpful information for anyone who is considering starting an email newsletter, I do notice most eCommerce newsletters send you emails pretty much every day but many business newsletters send you emails less than every day more often.
Maybe you can write an article on how to get email subscribers, you need subscribers before you can put these tips into action
Almost everything comes down to getting quality traffic, Jeff, doesn’t it?
Whether that’s to your blog or website, an affiliate offer or to a squeeze page to capture email addresses.
Whole courses have been created about ways to drive traffic organic traffic from social media, YouTube and paid sources like Google Adwords, FaceBook Ads, YouTube Ads, Pinterest Ads and so on.
I’ve had limited success in driving traffic from Safelists. I get one or two signups a day with this approach. But it’s become clear, despite me not wanting to acknowledge it, that getting traffic from paid sources is the way to go.
Right now I’m learning how to create YouTube Ads that are low-cost and effective and that will turn a profit. This will either be sending people directly to sales pages or by collecting email addresses through a squeeze page and exposing them to different offers over time via email.
I like you suggestion about writing an article on how to get email subscribers. I already partly covered that in these posts, but there are other ways to do list building which I’ll look at in a future posts:
Those are very interesting statistics. I have recently joined the ranks of affiliate marketers, so I have not yet started an email list. It has definitely been something I’ve been thinking about. The graphs you shared are intriguing. I have also heard that sending emails once a day was suggested, but the stats seem to say otherwise. My main take-aways are keep it short and include pictures! I will be watching for more information from you. Thank you!
Hi Heidi, the stats showing that sending out emails 2-3 times a week cane as a surprise to me as pretty much every list building course I’ve bought has suggested sending daily.
That’s to remind your subscribers of who you are and that your emails are worth opening.
Otherwise, they supposedly forget who you are and why they’re getting emails from you.
They forget they even singed up to your list and can send angry responses thinking they’re being spammed.
My email followup sequences (these are the automated series of emails you set up in an autoresponder) send out emails every day until the sequence is finished.
Certainly, having reviewed the 2019 email stats, I need to trim some of those emails as they are too long. I should convert the longer emails into blog posts and link out to them from my emails instead.
I do email broadcasts (sending out an email that’s not part of an email sequence) 1 to 3 times a week, depending on what there is to talk about.
Some email marketing coaches recommend having a very short email sequence to start subscribers off on – around 5 to 7 emails. And then only sending broadcast emails after that.
That’s a much bigger commitment as you have to be on top of what’s trending or of interest to your subscribers. It also requires more discipline to sit down and write a new email every single day (or at least a couple of times a week).
Thank you for sharing how you have been doing it! I was also unfamiliar with the terms “email sequence” and “email broadcasts,” so thank you for explaining them. I will have to think on this some more. For now I will probably focus on building my website then look into creating an email list in the future.
Is there a way to allow them to sign up to be notified anytime I post something new?
I use Aweber which has a feature called Blog Broadcasts, Heidi. I’m pretty sure the other autoresponder services have a similar feature.
With this feature, you paste in your blog’s RSS feed address, and it automatically picks up when you’ve published a new blog post and creates an email from it. There are various scheduling options for automatically sending out blog posts as soon as you publish a blog post, scheduling posts to go out at set times instead or having emails get set up as draft emails so you can review and tweak them before they get sent out.
But this feature only works for sending emails to people who have signed up to your list.
Use your RSS feed (it’s usually https:///feed) to alert other services when you post content. You only need to submit your links once to these services and they’ll periodically poll those links, looking for new posts. This is more a way to get your posts indexed than to get human eyeballs reading them. But anything that spreads the word about your posts is good.
Here are the top 10 RSS sites to add your RSS feed link to:
DA = Domain Authority; PA = Page Authority; Moz = Moz Rank. In all cases, a higher number is better.
That is great information! Thank you for sharing all of the RSS sites. I will work on getting my posts onto those sites!
I see what you’re saying, I need people to be signed up to actually get the email I’m wanting to send out. I suppose with time I can work on building an email list and having people to send things out to. Thank you!
Thank you for your very informative article. I learned a lot from reading it.
Someone suggested that I use email marketing to promote my online business. I do not know anything about it and was planning to do some research on it later on.
You article provided a lot of information that gave me a good understanding of what email marketing is. As the table showed the more emails you get, the less you read. I can relate, because reading emails can become overwhelming at times. Especially, when you are not interested in what they are offering.
You said you send out more than 8 emails per month, but you did not say how often you send them. Is it once or twice per week? The information provided on what content should be in the email was an eye opener, because most of the marketing emails that I get are very long. So, it is definitely time for some business people to change their email marketing strategies.
Thanks again
You should find the information about getting started in email marketing that you’re looking for here on this site, Jackie. Start off with these articles:
When someone signs up to my list, they get sent what’s called an “email sequence”. These are emails that are scheduled to go out automatically.
I have my sequence set up to send an email every day. That does go against what the statistics say I should be doing. But it’s what many list building coaches have told their students to do.
The only way you can know what email frequency works for your subscribers is to test, test, test.
Your email open rates will give some indication of how engaged your subscribers are.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as sending more emails = lower open rates.
How good your email’s subject lines are at getting your subscriber’s attention is just as important. Perhaps more so.
My heart sinks when I open an email and find 2 pages of dense text.
If I can’t be bothered reading emails like this, why should I expect my own subscribers to read long emails from me?
I now have to go back and shorten some of the emails I send out as I now know they’re too long.
There are no hard and fast rules in the email marketing business. It’s more art than science. But as you get to know your subscribers and what emails they open more and engage with, you can start tailoring your emails, and how often you send them, to that audience.
Yeah, it’s more work. But happy subscribers tend to spend money on your product recommendations. Unhappy ones don’t.