Average open rate for emails across industries has diminished to 8.7%: Chris Higgins

The Email Benchmark Report 2022 was recently released by Netcore Cloud, a valuable SaaS business and a world leader in customer engagement, communication and retention. The study examines data from an analysis of more than 100 billion emails across 22 main industries, including BFSI, retail and e-commerce, beauty, food, entertainment, and media. In order to help marketers improve their email strategy in 2022, it discusses changes in email marketing and benchmark measures since the global pandemic.

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In order to engage with customers and turn them into brand advocates, email marketing has emerged as one of the most reliable platforms. However, the global pandemic and the difficulties it brought with it have ushered in a new era of email marketing that has seen enormous advancements in interactivity, privacy, and multimedia. Netcore Cloud has published the second edition of its Email Benchmark Report for 2022 in response to the incredible reaction to its first edition and the growing importance of email in contemporary marketing.

In a conversation with Adgully, Chris Higgins, Senior VP - Marketing at Netcore Cloud, said “Friday is the best day of the week for getting high engagement on campaigns, while the worst day of the week to send a campaign is Sunday.” Excerpts:

What are the key findings of the Email benchmark report, 2022 and what methodology has been adopted?

The second edition of Netcore Cloud’s Email Benchmark Report analyses data from over 100 billion emails and across 22 major industry verticals, including Banking, Healthcare, E-commerce and Insurance. These emails span from Customer Engagement and Experience (CEE) and Email API platforms by companies using email delivery, campaign management, and automation solutions. The engagement results are captured on the dashboards of these platforms to make them visible to our customers.

The inbox placement results are generated from proprietary in-house tools, which contain seed addresses to measure the deliverability of the campaigns that were sent to customers globally. The report has been driven by the Product Marketing, Deliverability Experts, Data Analytics, and Developer teams of Netcore Cloud. 

The report observes that email marketing remains one of the most trusted channels for marketers to connect and build loyalty with customers. In keeping up with ever-changing customer behaviour, the report discovers significant changes, as traditional email marketing transitions to more automated, segmented, data-driven campaigns focussed on interactivity, privacy, and multimedia. More marketers are adopting AI to master the email channel and create tailored experiences for their customers through their email marketing programs.

Some Key Insights:

• Email deliverability rate - Email deliverability rate is the percentage of emails that reach the audience’s inboxes and don’t land in spam. The report highlights this to be the highest for the retail industry at an astounding 98.6% immediately followed by the food tech/food delivery industry at 98%. Foodtech grew positively during 2021 due to intermittent lockdowns and restrictions on social mobility. The data showed that entertainment/ media over-the-top (OTT) companies have the lowest deliverability with an average of 77%. Region-wise, Africa has showcased the best deliverability rate at 98%, followed by SEA at 97%. 
• Best Day/Worst Day for Emails - Friday is the best day of the week for getting high engagement on campaigns, while the worst day of the week to send a campaign is Sunday. However, this differs from industry to industry. While Sunday seems to be a perfect day to send an email across for MedTech, Monday works best for e-commerce, denoting that people like to kickstart the week by investing in their shopping aspirations. Travel companies make the most of Fridays to offer cheap deals for customers looking for a weekend getaway or short trips.
• Spamming Consumers - Online dating and the media over-the-top (OTT) industry has the highest spam complaints, with almost 30 emails every 10,000 emails sent. Job portals and the travel industry also feature in the third position with 14 emails getting complaints on Gmail on an average for every 10000 emails sent. Since Gmail is highly sensitive to spam complaints in determining inbox placement, they play a significant role in sustaining deliverability.

The average open rate for emails across industries diminished to 8.7%, possibly due to fatigue built up by continued lockdowns and extended stay-at-home periods. According to Netcore Cloud’s 2020 COVID survey report, 40% of users had reduced the frequency of checking their emails during the first lockdown. Some sectors like insurance (the highest open rate at 16.2%) and online pharmacy (15.1%) saw strong open rates as people purchased more life insurance and opted for contactless medicine and healthcare equipment during the pandemic. E-commerce (11.5%) also saw better open rates as volumes of online shopping surged.

How has email transformed to become a crucial channel for personalized and conversational marketing?

Over the last few years, emails have become an essential channel for marketers to deliver personalised and conversational content. Marketers are focused more on delivering quality over quantity. To combat digital fatigue, successful email marketers emphasised more on building relatable and personalised content and reducing the frequency of the emails sent to customers. There is growing adoption of artificial intelligence-powered features like Send Time Optimization (STO) and Subject Line Optimization (SLO) to segment recipients and optimize the time of delivery and the subject line.

Marketers can make their emails engaging by using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to add interactivity to emails. This enables recipients to complete all actions within the inbox, without needing to click and navigate external websites. This can be a great opportunity for marketers to create and send interactive emails, increase the dwell time of customers and improve engagement. It also increases the security of emails, limiting the use of third-party data. Banking and E-commerce are two industries that have adopted AMP widely and are reaping its benefits.

How has been the use of AI and other advanced technologies in Marketing and Customer Experience (CX)?

Artificial intelligence is no longer a new term for businesses across sectors. More and more companies are adopting it to enhance customer experience and engagement and the technology is increasingly helping email marketers.

Send Time Optimization (STO) which isan AI-powered feature, intuitively learns from the recipient’s past interactions to evaluate the best time to deliver emails to inboxes when the recipients are most likely to check their emails, thereby increasing engagement. This feature has widely been adopted by our clients, with the number of industries embracing it increasing to ten in 2021 from just one in 2020. The majority of the brands have benefited from STO, with an increase in open rates. In IT services and travel companies that have implemented STO, the open rate increased by a hundred per cent!

Subject Line Optimization (SLO) isanother AI-powered feature that tests, analyzes, and enhances the subject lines to get the highest engagement from recipients. In any email campaign, the subject line is one of the most important features that marketers strive to get right. Recipients are more likely to open emails that have personalized subject lines that they can form a connection with. High personalization and relevant subject lines also help in increasing click-through rates, and decreasing unsubscribe rates. Over the last twelve months, clients of 15 industries have adopted SLO.

The E-commerce sector has also actively adopted new technologies to improve customer experience and security. Ecommerce brands were seen to adopt Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for their email strategies widely in 2021. AMP emails for abandoned carts, shopping carts, and review use cases have provided promising results.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard allows brands to display authenticated emails with certified logos in the inbox. This improves credibility and trust among the subscribers and enables positive branding. 

A very important step to provide safety and create a sense of credibility for emails is by implementing email authentication. Protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC allow recipients to verify that the email has come from a genuine sender. This helps in blocking spam, phishing, spoofing, and other cybercrime. 

What is the action plan for email marketers in 2022?

Going forward, here are some important aspects that email marketers should be focusing their efforts on:

• Embrace AI-powered tools like Send Time Optimization (STO) and Subject Line Optimization (SLO) for making smart decisions with segmenting, predicting churn, selecting subject lines, and delivering emails to create experience-driven email programs.
• With the constantly changing privacy regulations around the world, marketers need to ensure that their data collection and storage practices are compliant with not just the global regulations, but also the regional regulations.
• To accurately measure the success of an email campaign, marketers should move away from open rates and look towards clicks and engagement as their primary success metrics. This is even more relevant now due to Apple’s MPP policy.
• Deploy AMP emails to boost engagement within the inbox. Using AMP interactive emails to reduce the steps in the customer journey can lead to higher conversions.
• Roll out BIMI and implement email authentication protocols to add a layer of authentication to your emails, improving trust and credibility.  When implemented right, they provide a positive consumer experience directly from the inbox.