Declining Email Read Rates
Here’s another troublesome trend line to add to falling retention and acquisition rates — falling email read rates.
A worldwide study by email services provider Return Path looked at 400,000 email campaigns conducted in the 4th Qtr of 2012 and compared them to the prior year. Some data points:
- Across all sectors, only 17% of email marketing messages were read.
- Subscribers read 27% of the messages they received from the top 100 retailers in Q4-2012. [Brand familiarity does matter … this probably applies in the nonprofit sector as well.]
- Email from social networking senders was among the least-read, with an average read rate
of 12% in 2011; that rate plunged by nearly half, to 6.3% last quarter 2012. - A bit of political trivia: the Obama campaign’s read rate was 8% higher than Romney’s.
- Messages opened on webmail clients represented an ever smaller share, dipping to 20% at the end of the year. Says Return Path: For retailers the takeaway is clear: It’s do-or-die when it comes to implementing a mobile email strategy.
Check out this infographic:
Is there a message here regarding the importance of making your fundraising emails mobile-friendly?!
Unfortunately, fundraising messages were not one of the categories studied by Return Path, but I suspect someone like Blackbaud could provide similar comparative date on email open rates. And in any event, you should be tracking your own!!
Tom
3 responses to “Declining Email Read Rates”
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A very good report from Return Path, who is a real leader in the email marketing and metrics industry. 1.8 billion data points is a good sample size.
The real story here isn’t email opens — it’s mobile email.
A couple of things worth pointing out:
– Email Open Rates Are An Imperfect Metric: The open rate of an email is never 100% accurate for a variety of factors. Lots of things throw it off by 10% to 30% like preview panes, text readers, blocked images, etc. You should pay attention to it but understand it doesn’t tell you the whole truth.
– Focus On Better Metrics: Most savvy email marketers spend more time on segmentation, A/B testing, click-through tracking, and conversion analysis than open rates. An open rate is just a directional indication — like watching a weather vane. Use smarter metrics to see what’s really happening over time.
– Mobile Email Has Reached The Tipping Point: We’ve heard for a while now about how the mobile web is going to take over traditional desktop use. Well, it’s now happened with email. And if your entire approach to email does not have a significant focus on mobile friendly email campaigns — then you’re in trouble.
For years now I’ve been talking to nonprofits about the need to plan for and embrace mobile. I’ve shown the predictions for when mobile surpasses desktop use. Sometimes I’ve felt like I was talking about flying cars or people living on the moon.
Now we’re seeing the first big mainstream area where mobile is changing how people choose to engage in a digital world. We’re not talking about apps or fringe cases. This is email — and despite reports of its death it’s still king in online communication.
There’s a simple 5 second mobile email preparedness test that every nonprofit can do right now. Pull your smartphone of choice out, open your email, look at the last email your organization sent to a group of constituents, and rate how good the entire experience is from open to scroll to click to action.
We do track email client usage of our clients. We had a unique opportunity with year end, since all of the ministries we work with send emails around year end.
The most popular email client: iPhone. Not the majority of opens, there are too many fractures in the email landscape for any client to get a majority.
Ditto on Steve’s concern about the accuracy of open rates. Mobile phones report more accurate open statistics and desktop and web based email clients tend to underreport.
All of that being the case, mobile is overtaking other mediums as THE way readers are engaging with your email. So responsive email design is the only responsible course.
Then you have to ask yourself: “What does my website look like on a phone?”
Ironically enough, your email isn’t optimized for iPhone. I had to enlarge the font size in order to read the content.
We are a Blackbaud Luminate user I have been spending some time recently trying to make our emails responsive to various screen size. Unfortunately, Luminate doesn’t track email client usage so unless they click through to any link in the email, we don’t know what devices our donors use to read our emails. We will continue to run some A/B tests to measure the response rate of email with or without the responsive design code embedded and learn from the results.
I agree with Steve with regards to the accuracy of some of the metrics. The importance of Android is probably downplayed in these studies because Androids by default do not load images in email, making open not trackable by some email service providers.