Imagine being able to analyze the email engagement stats of 10 billion global email opens in almost every industry and vertical. What could you do with information?
Things like knowing which emails clients and devices subscribers use. Or how users are engaging with content. Having access to these and other essential email engagement stats is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity. Not knowing these stats could cost you a great deal.
Here, drawing from the 2020 State of Email Engagement report from Litmus, we look at the top email engagement stats to help you craft your email campaigns, helping you create the kind of content your users love.
Note: having good engagement stats is great, but don’t forget to check that your email deliverability stats, too.
Subscriber Reading Habits
While it’s important to focus on compatibility with a wide range of email clients and devices, knowing which ones your audience prefers can make a large difference to your strategy.
Worldwide, the top email clients are: Apple iPhone (33%), Gmail (32%), Apple Mail (10%), Outlook (7%), and Yahoo Mail (5%).
There’s also been a shift in subscriber reading habits. For the first time in a while, webmail has surpassed mobile as a medium for reading emails, and even desktop has seen a slight boost over previous years.
This is most likely due to more people working from home throughout the pandemic, but it’s an interesting development nonetheless.
Gmail remains the most popular webmail client, with Apple iPhone claiming the number one spot for mobile email clients. Apple Mail is also leading as the number one desktop client.
While these are generalized trends taken over billions of opens worldwide, they can also serve as a benchmark from which to start planning your own email programs.
First, determine which email clients and devices your list prefers to use. Most email marketing services provide this information. If you discover it’s mostly mobile devices, plan your campaigns accordingly. If Outlook comes out on top, consider tailoring your emails to this client.
Dark mode is also increasing in popularity. This is most prevalent among Apple iPhone users, with 36% of users using dark mode on their devices. Therefore, it’s advised to ensure that you’ve created a dark mode version of your email template that looks fantastic.
Know When Subscribers Read Your Emails
In the US, 7% of all opens happen at 10am, and 21% of all opens happen between 9am and noon local time, which is handy to know if you’re mainly sending emails to the US market.
Other studies show that you get very little engagement after the first hour of sending an email. There’s also less than 1% chance of your email being opened if it wasn’t opened in the first 24 hours.
For the UK things are quite different, with 5pm being the time most users open emails. However, this has shifted to earlier hours during the pandemic, and is now more consistent with the US data.
Rather than take this at face value, test your campaign send times to figure out what’s best for your list. If you find one particular demographic has higher open rates than the rest of your list at a specific time, segment your list to take advantage of this.
More Email Engagement Stats
Tracking clicks and open rates may be essential email engagement stats, but they don’t reveal precisely how users are engaging with your content. In addition, it’s useful to get an idea of average read time, and how emails are shared.
Although most email service providers don’t provide the following information, The Litmus report tells us that the average read time is 11.82 seconds. This is down from 2018 but actually higher than it was in 2011. Read times have also risen slightly during the latter part of 2020.
Interestingly, mobile read times have been climbing. Mobile users have the highest read time of 12.56 seconds. This would indicate that mobile users on the whole, tend to have a higher response rate than desktop users.
Keep these numbers in mind when crafting your own campaigns. Make sure you capture your subscribers’ attention quickly. Consider creating mobile specific campaigns that are fun to read or engage with, in order to increase read times. Animated GIFs, gamification, and competitions are just a few options.
If you have an eCom product that offers coupons, according to Litmus the average print rate for this year is just 0.18%. You can expect this to be significantly higher for print-specific campaigns.
Finally, email forwarding is an area that’s often overlooked. With the average email forward rate at just 0.36%, it doesn’t sound huge. But over a long period of time, this can add up. So, make it easy for subscribers to forward your emails to their network. And encourage them to do so!
Making Use of Email Engagement Stats
On top of those already mentioned, there are other email engagement stats and metrics that will come in handy. Engaged and inactive subscribers, bounce rate, list health, and growth rate will all play a part in how you shape your email marketing strategy.
Keep an eye on your own deliverability trends and evaluate how users interact with your content to create better campaigns going forward. This will increase your engagement, boost your ROI, and make it easier to grow your email list further.
Once you have made changes to your email strategy, don’t forget to track and evaluate your key stats, so you can see the impact those changes are making.
