Thousands and thousands of emails flood our inboxes daily.
Gmail even had to introduce segments into their inbox to clear the clutter from our daily lives.
It’s becoming harder and harder to reach the decision makers that you need to reach.
And following some fancy, new-aged growth hack won’t cut it.
Every day we see a new hack. A new unicorn in the midst.
Most experts will tell you to “personalize” and “add humor.”
But those aren’t tangible tips for getting someone to respond to your email.
Simply adding personalization or being funny isn’t going to land a client when nobody has heard of your business.
The reason so many of those tips work for famous entrepreneurs is simply that they have brand awareness.
Which you probably don’t have.
Today we’re going to examine the data. Hard facts. Statistically significant numbers.
Real, tangible ways you can implement statistical data to stack the odds in your favor.
Here are five actionable email marketing statistics you should know.
1. The best date and time to send emails
When conducting an email marketing campaign, everything matters.
Everything from your tone of voice to your paragraph structure.
Even the date and time you send your campaigns can have a massive impact on final results.
But remember, this post is all about the data.
It’s all about hard numbers that can help you stack the odds in your favor.
Whimsical marketing-speak and growth hacks likely won’t work and aren’t sustainable.
You need tried-and-true, data-backed ways to bring in more responses.
One of the first places you should always start is the date and time.
It’s a critical factor and one of the easiest to control.
The latest meta-analysis, where CoSchedule analyzed and averaged the data between ten different studies on the best time to send an email, found some extremely useful information.
In a comparison study of the ten existing data sets, they found that Tuesday was the best day to send an email for better open, response, and conversion rates:
Behind that, Thursday ranked at #2, and Wednesday was #3.
If you’re going to send an email campaign, sending it on Tuesday is going to drive home better results.
But that’s not all.
You still need to hit the critical factor of timing.
When do you send it? What time of day?
Early, before everyone gets over the email stage of their day?
After lunch, while most workers are probably slacking off a bit?
According to the meta-analysis, the best time to send an email is 10 a.m.
While it was more common for users to send emails later in the day, the analysis found that emails sent at 10 a.m. had higher open, response, and conversion rates.
Side note: The time zones in this tip should reflect where the majority of your audience is.
To get the most out of your email campaign performance, test your next email blast on a Tuesday at 10 a.m.
Using GMass, you can schedule out campaigns right within Google Mail for ease of use:
Try testing your next campaigns with a combination of the time and dates in the meta-analysis:
See which one performs best for your business and keep using it until performance declines.
If one starts to see declining results, perform the test again and select a new winner with your audience.
Remember: each audience will differ. It’s up to you to test and find out which time and date performs best.
2. Generate a 100.95% higher click-through rate
That subheader almost feels like clickbait.
It almost feels like a get-rich-quick scheme. Like a scam.
But the fact is, it’s not. It’s real, statistical data.
A recent study from MailChimp found that segmented email campaigns drove 100.95% higher click-through rates than standard campaigns.
So, what exactly does segmentation entail?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to segment email groups.
You can do it by location: tapping into zip codes or city and state to offer targeted, local deals.
You can do it via date signed up or funnel stage: depending on where the users are in the lead process, they get different emails.
But the truth is, none of those have as high of an open rate as segmenting by interest groups.
Interest groups get the highest click-through rates in terms of segmentation.
Why? Just think about it.
Segmenting by funnel stages is good. But is it the best?
Probably not. Just because you have 1,000 leads who’ve signed up for a free trial doesn’t mean all of them will find your email offer appealing.
They might all have different uses, needs, or specialized case scenarios.
Within your lead group, there will always be different interests.
But when you break it down further and create sub-groups based on those interests, you reduce the pool of people while simultaneously being able to offer more specific deals.
Deals that are guaranteed to be well received by each interest group.
It’s the most highly-targeted form of email segmentation. That’s why it works.
When using GMass, take advantage of the manual follow-up campaign builder where you can segment campaigns by behavioral performance.
For example, if you notice that large groups within your list are engaged, segment them into a new campaign by connecting past campaign performance.
This will pull out those engaged users into a new list for you to target and segment by interests rather than funnel stage or a segmentation method that won’t convert as well.
3. Get 96.38% more clicks with one tweak
There are very few tactics or proven ways to get your click-through rate to skyrocket.
Segmentation is one of the few, as we just discussed.
That involves narrowing down your lists into specific groups based on similar interests.
That’s proven.
Want to generate an even higher click-through rate?
Introduce video into your emails.
A study conducted by GetResponse of nearly one billion emails found this:
Emails that included video have an average of 5.6% higher open rates and 96.38% higher CTRs than those that didn’t have video.
Video is dominating the digital marketing landscape, so it’s no wonder that video content produces such a high click-through rate.
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report, marketers are adding video-based platforms like YouTube to their content distribution strategy in masses.
Video is king online in terms of engagement.
YouTube has 1.5 billion logged-in monthly, active users on their platform.
On mobile devices alone, those users are spending more than one hour per day on average watching YouTube videos.
It’s safe to say that video is keeping users around like no other content medium we’ve ever seen.
Simply adding video to your emails has the power to generate 96% more clicks.
In your next email campaign, add video-based content to your segmented email list to drive those clicks even higher.
4. Increase open rates by 29%
Most personalization tips are bogus.
They tell you to simply add [first name] into the email and call it a day.
Sure, that might help with customer retention and engagement, but it’s not going to generate an open rate that shocks you.
Simple tactics like that were effective when marketers first introduced them.
But as tactics get more use, the effectiveness fades (see: Law of Shitty Clickthroughs).
When everyone is doing it, it’s no longer new or personalized.
But personalization can extend far beyond a simple name and company name.
According to a study by Experian, personalized promotional emails generate a 29% higher open rate.
When you send promotion-based or offer-based emails, you need to personalize them.
This means personalizing the basics like name and company.
But it also means going further:
Creating a unique discount code for each and every user on your list.
Why?
It makes the user feel like you’re only sending the email to them rather than to everyone on your list.
It’s deep, real personalization combined with promotional tactics to generate more opens and clicks.
With the GMass personalization guide, you have the option to create some powerful, personalized emails including things like company, city, date of birth, and coupon codes.
You can create any type of parameter or personalized column based on your own data.
Using the GMass Google Sheets integration, you can import a spreadsheet of your personalization parameters like [firstname] and [couponcode] directly into GMass.
Create customized, personalized parameters and combine those efforts with a promotional-based email containing individual coupon codes for each recipient.
For example, if you have a member of your list, you can structure the coupon code like this:
(lastname+discount percentage). The final product would be something like: Smith10.
Create this style of discount for promotion-based offers to everyone on your list.
You can even test the personalization parameters you make in the GMass draft mode to ensure successful sending.
Choose the “Just create Drafts” option to send it as a draft, enabling you to review the personalization and make sure that you don’t have any errors.
Want to increase your open rates by nearly 30%?
Add detailed personalization parameters in combination with a coupon-based promotional campaign.
5. Email automation wins the day
According to a study from the Epsilon Email Institute, email messages that are automated get 152% higher click-through rates and 70.5% higher open rates on average.
Marketing automation is crucial for success in the world of email.
Not only does it save time and labor, but it also saves money.
Less time spent running, monitoring and tweaking email campaigns means more time in your day to grow your business with other channels.
It also means paying less for time spent on emails.
Typically, workers will spend 17 hours every week checking, reading, and responding to emails.
That’s an absurd amount of time spent on emails.
But the truth is:
You don’t need to spend that much time on email anymore.
Automation seeks to circumvent typically tedious activities to send campaigns without the use of labor.
For example, if you send campaign A, you can send automatic drip follow-up emails to those who didn’t respond.
You can take those who did respond and automatically offer them a coupon or segment them into an email list.
There’s no need to sift through and do it yourself.
With GMass, you can utilize the automatic follow-up email reply system.
This feature is a drip-style email campaign that will automatically send responses to members of your list who don’t respond.
When they do respond, the drip campaign will stop, allowing you to jump in with a personalized response.
When sending a campaign, click on the settings tab and enable the auto follow-up tool:
Here you can send emails if the user does not respond.
Craft multiple stages and choose when to send the follow-up.
For example, if they don’t respond within two days, you can send another email that keeps the reply chain going, helping the recipient to see where your email came from.
It’s drip automation at it’s finest.
Implement automation using the auto follow-up tool in GMass today to skyrocket your open and click rates.
Conclusion
Growth hacks don’t work 98% of the time.
It’s why they’re called growth hacks.
They don’t come around daily. Otherwise, we’d all be the next Zuckerberg.
And simply adding personalization isn’t going to cut it in the 21st century.
Most email marketing tips are vague and lack actionable data.
Add more emojis. Add X, Y, and Z in your subject line.
But the truth is, one-off tips that worked for one person might not work for your business or clientele.
Sticking to hard numbers and data is the best way to stack the deck in your favor.
Follow the actionable email marketing statistics in this post, and you’ll have the best weapon possible on your side:
Statistical odds.
Now go out there and shatter your latest KPIs.
Sources:
Statistic 1:
https://coschedule.com/blog/best-time-to-send-email/
Statistic 2: https://mailchimp.com/resources/research/effects-of-list-segmentation-on-email-marketing-stats/
Statistic 3:
https://www.getresponse.com/about/press-center/releases/01-12-2009.html
Statistic 4:
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2016/01/70-email-marketing-stats-you-need-to-know/
Statistic 5:
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2016/01/70-email-marketing-stats-you-need-to-know/
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Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.
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