Email marketing benchmark 2018: Most people open mailings on mobile devices
Just under 46 percent of email campaigns were opened on a mobile device last year, about 30 percent on a desktop, and roughly 24 percent via webmail. Another interesting finding: Companies in the arts and culture sector recorded the highest open rates.
According to the Inxmail Email Marketing Benchmarks 2018, the open rate of the mailings surveyed in 2017 was 28.1%. In an industry comparison, companies from "Art & Culture" came out on top with 51%, closely followed by "Leisure & Tourism" (41%) and "Consumer Electronics" (39.4%).
The key figures also show that mailings sent to a smaller group of recipients have higher average open rates than those sent to large mailing lists: While almost half of mailings sent to a mailing list of up to 100 recipients are still opened (46 percent), the open rate drops to 18 percent for a very large mailing list (more than 100,000 recipients). The results suggest that smaller mailing lists are generally better maintained and the content is significantly more relevant for the recipients. The analysis of the mailings also revealed a click rate of 3.8 percent and a bounce rate of 0.7 percent.
Mobile optimization is mandatory
For the first time, the Inxmail Email Marketing Benchmark 2018 includes an analysis of the email clients used to read the mailings examined. The results show: Just under 46 percent of mailings were opened in a mobile client, around 30 percent via desktop and around 24 percent via webmailer. As reading habits have a significant influence on the design and optimization of mailings, these key figures underline the importance of mobile optimization in email marketing.
Above-average performance of transactional emails
email marketing provider Inxmail provides an insight into the key figures of transactional emails with this benchmark. These are emails that are triggered by visitor and user actions in online stores, portals or other systems and are sent automatically via the Inxmail Commerce solution.
The results confirm the above-average performance of these event-related one-to-one emails compared to newsletters: the open rate of 60.7% for transactional emails is more than three times as high as for newsletters. At 14.4 percent, the click rate is even better in comparison (newsletter: 3.6 percent). In this context, "article-available" emails are particularly successful, with an open rate of 88.6% and a strikingly high click rate of 68.2%.
The benchmark is based on several million anonymized emails from over 1,000 Inxmail customers in the target markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. All emails sent between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017 via the email marketing solutions Inxmail Professional and Inxmail Commerce were analyzed. The results are the median of the key figures analyzed. The entire benchmark can be viewed online as PDF can be downloaded.
