As I mentioned last week, I took a short vacation over the weekend so for the most part was away from my email with any regularity. Now that I have returned, I took a look at my inbox and it got me to thinking about the topic I covered two weeks ago related to timing and frequency.
So, I asked myself and I ask you, how much email is too much for you? In that time frame from 10/10 through 10/17, I received 525 emails. That equates to 75 emails a day. Given this is a personal account, it seems like a lot. Here's some mind blowing statistics:
- 205 BILLION emails are sent a day (as of 2015)
- average U.S. desktop open rate is 18%
- 42% of Americans check their email in the bathroom
We have a love affair with our email almost as strong as that with our phone and given that 66% of emails are opened on a mobile device, that makes sense.
Given all this, are we getting too much email? My vote is yes. Just in my one post a few weeks ago, I identified some of the egregious uses of email marketing and where people are just doing "spray and pray" - something that should be long gone in this day of predictive analytics, big data and dynamic targeting.
Why do marketers send too much email? I can think of all kinds of reasons like lack of strategy and focus, lack of talent, lack of tools and more. But, we can do better.
What I find interesting is the differences between industry and genre of email. Here's a good summary of email statistics by industry.
This summary tells you something about the psyche of email recipients and perhaps why we continue to send too many emails.
Daily deal emails have the lowest open rates at 13.87%, but also the lowest unsubscribe rates. We don't want to miss a deal even when we don't engage. How can we deliver fewer emails while still serving the consumers need for a deal? We know that when people are ready to transact, they will first search for a "deal." Just check your brand name in a search with the word "coupon" or "deal," or look at the sites that make their living offering deals like ebates or coupons.com to name a few. We send thousands and thousands of emails with deals, take a look at just a few from my inbox this week.
These all came within the past week without regard to my purchasing history: what I purchase, when I am likely to purchase again or what I might purchase. Does the deal drive me to take action? While it might if I had already been thinking of purchasing, it is more likely the trigger is something else. What if instead of receiving these unwanted emails that are not in alignment with my need for the product or a deal, I could get the deal when I am in the transaction process? Would that increase my conversion during that time? Would that keep me on the site and not distracted by other searches to find that deal? How would I feel about the company if they made it easier for me to purchase with a discount when I want to purchase?
I don't propose to have all the answers, but it does seem to me that as marketers we should be asking these questions and finding better ways than sending millions of unwanted emails.
I would like to see my inbox filled with 20 highly relevant and compelling emails than the 75 I averaged this week of which very few did I open and even fewer did I take action on.
We can do better. SOUR eMail can and should stop. What are you doing to improve your email performance? What is good performance for you? Is it getting better each week, month and year? What are the right metrics to even use?
We will answer some of these questions in our next post on email metrics and what you should be using to measure your success and how to continue to improve and evolve your email marketing.
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