The following is a guest article by Natalie Jackson, Marketing Director, emfluence
If it felt like you received more marketing emails in 2020 than ever before, you were right. Across the board, email providers and marketing automation platforms (like the emfluence Marketing Platform) reported triple digit increases in email send volume last year as marketers scrambled to stay connected to their target audiences in a disrupted marketplace.
For email marketers, it was nice to have a year where people didn’t proclaim “email is dead,” but all that extra email didn’t always create a great experience for recipients. Email made headlines for the worst reasons, and as marketers scrambled to fill the gap in leads from other sources, email’s relevancy took a hit.
As the emfluence Marketing Platform team pulled together data for our 2020 Email Marketing Benchmarks Report, it was clear the pandemic made an impact on email marketing metrics beyond the increase in send volume. The metrics told stories about which industries were most impacted by disruption, which audience bases were primed for the switch to digital buying, and what types of emails were most effective.
The Impact on Healthcare and B2B Email
Each year, the emfluence Marketing Platform Email Marketing Benchmarks Report focuses on engagement across our primary industries, including Healthcare and Technology. As you can see in this snippet from our report, some industries had a better year in email than others:
Taking a look first at Healthcare, open rates and clickthrough rates did not change much between 2019 and 2020—given the pandemic, it’s likely that Healthcare emails remained valuable to recipients looking to navigate a health crisis. There was a dip, however, in click-to-open rate, or the percentage of people who opened and clicked, which could be evidence of the fact that 2020 saw an uptick in informational emails—wherein the email’s sole purpose is to keep recipients up to date on important information without demanding the recipient click through to a website first.
Technology, on the other hand, is an industry that continues to struggle with email engagement in our report, year after year. In our experience, unsuccessful email strategies in the Technology space tend to feature content that services the sender more than the recipient—often times with list acquisition strategies that don’t ask permission before sending. If Technology marketers want to see lifts in their open rates and engagement rates, we recommend starting with a strategy overhaul:
- Map your customer journey, focusing first on your best performing marketing channel. Use this exercise to identify where you can layer in email to support the journey. You can use our template here to get started.
- Remember the three primary reasons a person will subscribe to email, and ensure the emails you decide to send fit into one of these three categories:
- Thought leadership in your niche.
- Discounts and special offers (yes, even B2B can do this!)
- Product updates, features, and use cases.
- Personalize, personalize, personalize—and do so beyond the first name. Email is a relationship tool, not an acquisition tool.
What about B2B email overall? With standard channels like direct mail, account-based marketing, and events largely cancelled, many B2B companies scrambled to double down on email marketing, sometimes without much consideration for the health of the lists to which they were mailing. B2B industries saw small dips in engagement overall (fewer than 3% decreases over 2019), but the data suggests that B2B marketers may have relied too heavily on old email segments in a landscape that saw other channels fail. For each of the B2B industries in our report, bounce rates increased by more than half a percent over 2019. In 2021, B2B marketers should see more success in email as a channel if they instead invest in beneficial list acquisition strategies and map email to the customer journey rather than focusing on batch-and-blast campaigns to old or unsegmented lists.
How 2020 Shifted What We Send
This year’s report also prompted us to think about the ways in which marketers used email in 2020—and how that shift in usage impacted traditional engagement metrics, like open rates. One of the most interesting shifts in email strategy last year was the increase in marketers using email to communicate community-centered messages, like “in this together” COVID messages or emails in support of Black Lives Matter. These messages often lacked a traditional call-to-action, which served as a good reminder that measuring the success of email is about more than open and click rates. It’s a good reminder for email marketers to tie specific expectations to an email that go above and beyond clicks and opens. A few of our recommendations include:
- Increase in app/software use (or consumption) driven from email
- Increase in website traffic with email
- Increase in appointments set or opportunities won
- Decrease in “ghosted” opportunities
- Increase in number of sales qualified leads (converted from a marketing qualified lead nurture)
Getting Ready for the End of Third-Party Cookies
If 2020 wasn’t enough to fully sell you on the power of email marketing, Google’s announcement of the end of third-party cookies at the end of this year should do the trick. If you haven’t heard, Google will no longer allow marketers to target ads with third-party cookies, which means that now is the time to grow your first-party data—in other words, your email list.
That means focusing your efforts first on having a strong content engine that people will want to subscribe to—what sorts of value can you add to their inbox? Remember the three reasons people are likely to subscribe to email that we mentioned above.
Once you have strong content, be sure to encourage people to subscribe in visible, obvious places. A few ideas to get you started:
- Lightbox modals on your website
- Checkbox options on your contact forms (on landing pages for both appointment requests and content downloads)
- Once we can get back to tradeshows, at your booth
- At the end of your lead nurture series
Our Email Marketing Benchmarks Report
Even in normal years, the emfluence team recommends evaluating your standard email metrics (e.g., clicks, opens, unsubscribes) against industry and category benchmarks. It’s a great way to see if your overall engagement is on track or needs a little help, and it can lead to impactful conversations around email strategy and success. You can download emfluence’s Email Marketing Benchmarks Report for a look at:
- Average email metrics by common industries
- B2B email marketing metrics
- The impact of COVID shutdowns and holiday email traffic in the inbox
- Send volume across industries
- Automated versus manual email performance
- And more!
Get your copy of emfluence’s Email Marketing Benchmarks Report here.
About the emfluence Marketing Platform: The emfluence Marketing Platform is so intuitive, you’ll swear it was built just for you. We believe that usability is as important as functionality – that’s why emfluence offers hundreds of ways to personalize your emails, options for HTML designs and drag-and-drop builders, and a full stack of marketing automation tools to transform your data into a powerhouse of marketing potential. With support request times that are 5x faster than industry average, a proven track record with HIPAA requirements and healthcare company needs, and the ability to build new features and functionality to meet the needs of our marketers, we’re one of the only marketing automation platforms that can truly say we’re building this software for you. Whether you need help mid-campaign or guidance for your next steps, the emfluence Marketing Platform is here to help you make the most of your digital marketing.
Get a demo of the best HIPAA-compliant marketing platform you’ve never heard of here.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Add Comment