Are New Subscribers Engaging With Marketing Emails?

It’s a huge victory everytime you’re able to attract someone’s attention to a point that they subscribe to your email newsletter – or is it? According to a new report by the folks at Epsilon, email marketers are actually failing to engage new subscribers. Studying a total of 12.2 billion emails sent by 140 clients in Q4 of 2014, Epsilon found that 2/3rds of new subscribers failed to interact with the emails that they were receiving for the three months following sign-up.

That said, Epsilon found some good news in that open rates increased by as much as 5% for all industries compared to last year‘s findings. Furthermore, five of the thirteen industries surveyed had a click rate increase of 5% or higher, and five also had a click-to-open rate increase that was 5% or higher.

When looking at specifics, Financial services/CC Banks had the highest open rates in Q4 2014, at 47.9%, with Retail companies in second place at 40.1%, and general financial service companies in third at 35.7%. Though they had the highest open rates, the highest click rates went to Business Publishing/Media companies at 7.1%, and Consumer Publishing/Media companies at 5.5%. The highest click-to-open rates also went to Business Publishing/Media at 28.6%, with Consumer Publishing/Media again at second place with 21.6%.

Industries analyzed

Taking a look at the types of emails that were being sent, Epsilon found nearly 60% of them to be deemed as marketing emails – up from 59% last year. ?Other? types of emails took up the remaining majority of emails sent, at 34%. The rest was made up of Service, Editorial, Research, Acquisition and Newsletter emails.

Service, Editorial, Research, Acquisition and Newsletter emails

Epsilon also took a look at triggered emails in their study, analyzing a total of 640 million triggered emails sent across all industries in Q4. Triggered emails consisted of Welcome, Thank You, Abandon Shopping Cart, and Confirmation emails. In comparison to last year, triggered emails accounted for 4.1% of ?total email volume,? whereas last year, they accounted for only 3.5% – a 15.3% increase since Q4 last year. Triggered click rates have continued to perform admirably, ‘reporting 135.8% higher than business as usual (BAU)  emails.? This is consistent with data last year when triggered click rates were at 127.% over BAU emails.

Now back to engaging new customers? It was found that only 9% of new customers click-through an email, and as we mentioned earlier: two-thirds of new subscribers have no opens or clicks. In Q4 2014, a mere ?34% of subscribers were active after their initial opt-in to an email program (new clickers and new openers). This was down from 38% in Q4 2013.? To download the entire Epsilon report, click here!

New subscriber behavior