To understand how COVID-19 has affected businesses from an email standpoint, Yes Marketing, a division of Infogroup, looked at some year-over-year numbers across industries. The company’s senior analyst of intelligence products, Kris Sakaluk, presents some key findings.
As the pandemic’s toll deepens around the globe, email remains a vital channel for businesses and organizations in every sector. But as with every aspect of daily life, the landscape has changed and marketers need to change with it.
To understand how COVID-19 has affected businesses from an email standpoint, Yes Marketing, a division of Infogroup, looked at some year-over-year numbers across industries. Here are some key findings to keep in mind as we wade further into this era of uncertainty.
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Campaigns Sent and Inbox Performance
On comparing the total number of campaigns sent to date in 2020 versus the same period in 2019, we see that marketers have only sent a little over half (55.56%) the total number of campaigns this year than they had last year at this time. This represents merely the beginning of the impact that COVID-19 will have on the email industry and, by extension, the marketing industry. Of the total number of emails sent in 2020, 8.8% have been focused on the virus (i.e., they contain “COVID†or “coronavirus†within their subject line or email body).
We’ve also seen an uptick in campaigns successfully reaching the intended subscribers (87.15% in 2019 vs. 87.92% in 2020). Importantly, ISPs are passing through an even higher rate of COVID-19 related emails (89.04%). This is likely in response to the fact that, given the current situation, subscribers are looking for more relevant content from the brands with which they are connected. When ISPs see subscribers opening emails at a higher rate and directly looking for specific campaigns within their email accounts, they respond by filtering similar campaigns to subscribers’ inboxes.
Engagement and Disengagement Rates
The real question, of course, is what’s happening once those emails hit the inbox. The first key metric in that regard is the open rate, which gives marketers a quick way to determine how subscribers feel about their programs.
From 2019 to 2020, open rates have declined from 26.3% to 25.32%, meaning subscribers are very gradually pulling away from brands’ daily, weekly, and monthly mailings. Meanwhile, open rates on COVID-19 emails is 0.73% higher (26.05%) than the 2020 average – a very slight improvement that’s nonetheless worth noting given the challenges email marketers are facing elsewhere. Despite the higher open rates on these communications, it’s too soon to know whether brands have been able to have a positive impact with those communications and deepen brand loyalty, or whether the emails were seen as piling on top of the tidal wave of similar communications that subscribers have been receiving.
In addition to a decline in open rates between 2019 and 2020, we’ve also seen a notable uptick in delete rates, where subscribers delete a message without engaging at all. Delete rates have risen from 7.42% in 2019 to 11.31% in 2020 (a whopping 52% year-over-year increase), with COVID-19 communications being deleted at an even higher rate (12.18%). This is a strong indication that subscribers feel email content is growing stale and that the volume of virus-centric communications is becoming overwhelming.
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Things get even more interesting when you look at engagement and disengagement rates year over year. The delete-after-open metric, which tracks how a program is retaining subscriber interest, has seen a negative trend in 2020, rising from 13.47% in 2019 to 15.48% in 2020. COVID-19 emails in 2020 saw a delete-after-open rate of 15.35% – slightly better than the 2020 average but still a couple of points higher than 2019. In other words, subscribers in 2020 are more likely to move on from an email at a faster pace.
In these uncertain times, it’s more imperative than ever for marketers to be strategic in their communications, and that includes reevaluating previously established best practices in the face of consumer behavior shifts. Given declining open rates, it makes sense for marketers to review their current email strategies to be sure they’re giving programs their best chance at a time when people are ignoring more promotions in their inboxes, despite receiving fewer of them. To maximize impact with email, marketers must maximize relevanceOpens a new window .