Seven Popular Myths of Email Marketing

|
Email Marketing Myths That You Should Know

Here are seven popular email marketing myths and the actual facts behind them:

The Fact: Around 40% of consumers who receive emails from brands are getting no more than three per day, on average, and almost two-thirds (63%) receive no more than six emails per day. Research from Merkle also suggests that three-quarters (74%) of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email, which means that consumers prefer emails from brands rather than other channels.

The Fact: This myth assumes that consumers simply are waiting for a brand to email them, and that consumers act immediately on every email they receive. However, it shows that while 76% of email opens happen in the first two days, four out of five purchases (79%) take place after that two-day period. One-third (32%) of purchases take place more than two weeks after the consumer receives an offer email.

The Fact: 20% of a brand’s annual unique opens are from people who have been inactive for the first six months of the year. So, by not sending emails to users who are deemed inactive for just a year, brands are potentially missing out on one-fifth of their annual opens.

The Fact: Less than one subscriber in every 2,000 will mark an email as spam.

The Fact: Though it’s true that increasing send frequency tends to reduce the open and click rates for a given message, if a brand increases the number of emails it sends to consumers from one per month to four, more than doubles the number of consumers opening one or more emails (from 10% to 24%). The increase in email volume also, on average, results in an additional 11% of revenue for the brand.

The Fact: Analysis of more than 200 million emails highlights that short subject lines (fewer than 60 characters) will only help increase open rates. However, if brands want consumers to engage with emails—by opening and clicking on the content—then 70 characters or longer will be more successful. The longer the subject line, the more likely consumers are to click on the content within the email.

The Fact: People often thought that “keywords are the main cause an email ended up in the junk folder”. Actually, they have little or no effect. Whether an email ends up in a junk folder is more complicated than that, with the main reason being the sender’s reputation. And that is generally based on what information the mail filter or receiving ISP can gather about the sending habits of your IP address, rather than the contents of its subject line.

Email marketing has put up with these myths for long enough, and many of them are rooted in the belief that marketers must send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Marketers must move beyond the pursuit of three “centers” of email marketing: segmentation, timeliness, and relevance. They should no longer see email as simply a direct marketing tool. Instead, brands should see the benefits of email as a broadcast channel, which allow marketers to communicate a message to millions of subscribers regularly rather than sending less email, to less people, less often.