Email-Marketing Optimization—When, Where, and How People Engage With Email

When, where, and how do people typically engage with email? Check out these 2017 survey results for insight, as well as some tips for how to optimize your email campaign performance and deliverability.

In July 2017, Adobe conducted an online survey of white-collar workers in the United States, aged 18 or older, who own a smartphone. Here are some interesting highlights from the Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report 2017:

• Smartphones are the most used device for checking emails (81%), followed by desktops/laptops (74%). The use of tablets (21%) for checking emails has decreased since 2016.
• Most respondents check both their personal and work email a minimum of every few hours during the day.
• Most of the respondents (74%) check their business emails before arriving at their workplace, with 26% checking it while still in bed, 37% while getting ready for work or eating breakfast, and 11% while commuting to work.
• When asked where they checked their email during the past month, of the workers who responded:
  • 69% said while watching television or a movie
  • 54% said while in bed
  • 46% said while on vacation
  • 43% said while in the bathroom
  • 38% said while on the phone
  • 34% said while walking
  • 32% said while during a meal with others
  • 32% said while commuting to/from work.
• 61% of the respondents preferred to be contacted by brands through email. And as far as the buying process, marketing emails from brands provided an added incentive to purchase for 42% of the respondents.
• Work emails (82%) are more likely to be opened than personal emails (60%), with almost half of all respondents reporting that they open 100% of their work emails (which is what we’d expect).
• Respondents attributed stronger spam filters (23%) and better mobile viewing (20%) to most improving their email experience.
• According to the respondents, the most annoying thing about getting emails includes:
  • Getting emails from a brand too frequently (50%)
  • Emails that are too wordy/poorly written (27%)
  • An offer that makes it clear that marketers’ personal data about the recipient is wrong (24%)
  • An email urging them to purchase a product they already purchased (20%).
• The most annoying thing when reading email from a brand on a smartphone was:
  • Not being optimized for mobile (21%)
  • Having to wait for images to load (20%)
  • Having to scroll too much (19%)
  • Font size that’s too small (17%)
  • Too much text (14%).
• Test recipients were asked, “If you could change one thing about the emails you get from brands, what would it be?” The top responses included:
  • 40% of the respondents said to make the emails less about promoting products and more about providing information
  • 27% of the respondents said for the brands to develop content that’s better personalized to their interests.
• Customization of emails from brands was rated from medium to high importance among all age groups of respondents.
• What was the most frustrating way that emails lacked personalization?
  • 34% of the respondents said getting recommendations that didn’t match their personal interests
  • 24% of respondents said getting offers that already expired
  • 15% of respondents said the misspelling of their names.
• 62% of the respondents said that they were most interested in receiving special offers and promotions from brands in which they are interested.

Study Shows Best Days and Times to Send Email Campaigns for Best Engagement

In another recent study, SendinBlue found that email campaigns had the best engagement during weekdays: More than 85% of the emails that were opened and 90% of the emails that were clicked were sent during weekday hours. Emails sent between Tuesday and Thursday, mid-morning to mid-afternoon, had the highest engagement rates. Furthermore, approximately one-quarter of emails were clicked between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.

5 Top Tips for Optimizing Your Email-Marketing Campaigns

Based on the results from these recent surveys, here are some tips for optimizing your email campaigns to help boost engagement, sales, and deliverability:

1. Because so many people check emails on their smartphones, mobile optimization and responsive design are a must for email marketers today. Optimizing email-marketing campaigns for your mobile audience is one of the key best practices to help keep unsubscribe rates low and reduce the number of subscribers who mark your email as spam. In addition, the things about reading emails on smartphones that the survey respondents found most annoying wouldn’t be an issue if marketers optimized for mobile (e.g., waiting too long for images to load, having to scroll too much, font size that’s too small, and too much text).
2. When it comes to getting emails, survey respondents rated brands that send emails too frequently as the biggest annoyance. So be sure to test and optimize for the best email frequency and cadence for your target audience.
3. Consumers prefer emails that provide special offers and promotions from brands, as well as relevant information that is accurately personalized. Segmenting your email list into different groups is an effective way to send more-personalized email-marketing messages that meet the needs and interests of your individual subscribers. The segmentation of your email list can be based on a variety of data, including demographic, geographic, and behavioral. Check out these NewsLever articles on segmentation and predictive analytics for some great information and segmentation best practices to help you effectively personalize and optimize your email campaigns.
4. Marketing automation is another effective tool for keeping your subscribers engaged and happy. By using software to automatically send emails based on a customer’s engagement, you can deliver more personalized and relevant email campaigns to individual subscribers. See the following articles for information about the types of automated emails to send and tips for creating a successful automation email series:
   • “Email Marketing Automation—How to Take Your ROI to the Next Level“
   • “4 Tips for Building a Powerful Email Automation Series“
5. Even if your sales and promotions start at the beginning of the week, you may find that sending your promotional emails mid-week will get the best response. But be sure to test and optimize your email campaigns to determine the best days and times for reaching your specific target audience.

Tracking Email Engagement Metrics Is Key to Email Optimization

Tracking your email engagement metrics is key to making the best data-driven decisions for your email campaigns. Is your business challenged by organizing and analyzing your email-marketing data for testing and optimization? Then, FulcrumTech’s IntelliSents may be just the tool that your marketing team needs to improve your email engagement and return on investment. IntelliSents is an online email analytics platform that presents email performance and deliverability trends over time of more than 25 of the most important data points, including open, click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe rates.

Contact the experts at FulcrumTech today for a free IntelliSents demo and to learn more about what you can do to effectively optimize your email campaigns.

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• Data-Driven Email Marketing—Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking
• Using Predictive Analytics in Email Marketing
• Email Send Frequency – What’s Your ROI Sweet Spot?
• Email Cadence is the Key to Campaign Success