I find in my travels that many agencies are simply out of touch with the huge changes that are taking place in the way we communicate the products we offer. So I did some research and everything I read confirms that email marketing when done well is extremely successful. I came across some research by Alchemy Worx, who are a specialist email marketing agency and their research explodes seven major myths of email marketing that I thought I would pass on to you.
The first myth is that consumers are drowning in emails from trusted brands. Research shows that around 40% of consumers who receive brand emails are receiving no more than three per day with the other 60% receiving no more than six each day. The research also confirms that 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communication via email, which is a higher percentage than any other communication channel.
The second myth is that there is a best time to send emails. The research shows that while 76% of email’s are opened in the first two days, 80% of purchases take place after that two day period and over a third take place more than two weeks after the email is received.
The third myth is that you should stop sending emails to inactive users after six months. The research showed that around 20% of emails sent to customers who had been dormant for six months result in purchases.
The fourth myth that Alchemy Worx uncovered is that consumers are not trigger-happy with the spam button. In fact less than one subscriber in every 2000 will mark an email as spam.
The fifth myth I think is a very interesting one. The belief is that if you send more emails, consumers will increasingly ignore them. The research shows that over a three-month period, if a brand increases the number of emails it sends to consumers from 1 to 4, that increases the number of consumers opening one or more emails from 10% to 24% and results in increased revenue of 11%.
The sixth myth is that short email subject lines give better results. Alchemy Worx analyzed over 200 million emails and found that 70 characters or longer in the subject line caused more consumers to click on the content of the email.
The final myth that was debunked is that subject lines cause emails to end up in the spam folder. After analysis of 200 clients and 540 billion emails it showed that the wording of the subject line has little to do with the email being determined as spam. The main reason is the sender’s reputation.
The conclusion was that marketers using emails must move beyond segmentation, timeliness, and relevance and instead see email as a broadcast channel allowing marketers to communicate a message to millions of subscribers regularly rather than sending less emails to less people less often.