The company shared this key finding during the recent 2023 Everlytic Roadshow, which comprised of three events held in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and on a webinar respectively. The roadshow unpacked some of the valuable engagement data insights revealed in Everlytic’s latest Email Marketing Benchmarks Report. More than 10 billion emails sent by South African businesses over a two-year period were analysed for this report.
Everlytic’s executive head of sales and marketing, Louise Krog, told the roadshow attendees: “Email is definitely a serious medium. It’s a medium that’s going to continue to expand and grow. Just look at email in your own life, your inbox is the backbone of how you govern your daily life.”
Krog presented a graph showing the company’s open rate data from 2014 to 2022. Homing in on the findings between 2020 and 2022, she showed how engagement started to increase in 2020 when people were huddled in their houses during the Covid-19 pandemic. The open rate increased across every industry and reached an all-time high in 2022.
Krog said: “If you look at the average open rate across all the emails that were sent, it has increased 17% between 2020 and 2022 to 29.28%. It’s very cool to see the industry with the highest open rate being hospitality at 35.31%, and they’ve also had the biggest jump since 2020 with 49%. This is massive.”
Overall, click-through rates have increased by 1% since 2020, with the business and consulting services industry leading the pack. Krog explained: “The click-to-open rate helps you to measure the content on how you have enticed action from the audience, and it is considered by many as the best way to measure and track the effectiveness. We are going to understand and use this way of measuring and tracking even more going forward because it’s linked to email security.”
Speaking on the new email privacy changes, Everlytic’s head of direct sales, David Sepulveda, noted the analysis found a high upward trend in the use of webmail applications. “One reason could be recipients are using more web-based communication such as Gmail, Apple Mail, or Office 365. Or it could involve Mail Privacy Protection,” he explained. “It’s a new protection policy where the host servers cache the content before the recipient opens [the mail]. If the content is cached, then on our side, it appears it has been opened.”
Sepulveda advised the following three ways to adjust to the new email privacy changes: check whether subscribers are using Apple Mail or Gmail, prioritise clicks instead of opens, and optimise calls to action to increase clicks. He was happy to report a downward trend overall in unsubscribe rates between 2020 and 2022. The attendees engaged enthusiastically with the Everlytic team, raising questions, dissecting the data, and commenting on the trends they were finding in their own email campaigns.
You can download the full Email Marketing Benchmarks Report on our website.
