The evolution of Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective tools for engaging with customers – providing you implement it correctly.

Visual Identity has evolved with the times during our 30 years in business and e-marketing trends, in particular, have progressed throughout our industry life.

After the year 1990, emails began to catch the attention of the public with the emergence of new communications platforms such as Yahoo! and Hotmail. With the help of these platforms, it became possible for the users to send and receive emails on different platforms, apps or devices.

Over time, email became increasingly popular with marketers also showing a requirement for emails. Because of this open communication channel, anyone could email anybody, which subsequently resulted in the term “Spam” being introduced in the Oxford English Dictionary, due to the influx of spam emails being received.

The twenty-first century produced a further advancement in email technology which lead to mobile email services. This soon became extremely popular and in fact, in 2008, ex-president of the USA – Barack Obama became the first president to use mobile email. Apple later introduced the iPhone with HTML and CSS based emails, which were more interactive useable for users. This soon lead to the decline of plain text emails.

Nowadays, email marketing has become far more sophisticated. Digital marketers will generally filter their list of subscribers depending on the campaign they’re promoting and will only send emails to the continually engaged audience or segment their audience into different groups. This allows us to send more personalised emails to different demographics and therefore enhance customer engagement.

    • 1. Email generates around £29bn of retail sales annually
    • 2. 73% of marketers rate email as the number one digital channel for ROI
    • 3. ROI for email increased from an estimated £30.03 for every £1 spent in 2016 to £32.28 in 2017
    • 4. 86% of marketers say email is ‘important’ or ‘very important’ to their multichannel marketing strategy
    • 5. 83% of marketers consider their email marketing strategy to be ‘somewhat’ to ‘very’ successful when compared with their competitors
    • 6. 58% of millennials say that email is their preferred way to be contacted by a brand
    • 7. Email use worldwide will top 3 billion users by 2020
    • 8. Despite the increased use of many other forms of communication such as instant chat and social networking, email continues to be the leading form of business communication
    • 9 Gmail has 1 billion active users worldwide
    • 10. Two-thirds of emails are read on mobile devices
    • 11. Three-quarters of Gmail users access their accounts on mobile devices
    • 12. 58% of mobile email opens are on an iPhone
    • 13. 3 in 5 consumers check their emails on the go (mobile)
    • 14. 66% of email unsubscribes occur between 5 and 10 pm
    • 15. Leisure, Sports & Recreation have the highest Industry mobile email readership with 60%
    • 16. 44% of consumers say that they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalised shopping experience with a particular company
    • 17. 49% say they have purchased a product that they did not initially intend to buy after receiving a personalised recommendation from a brand
    • 18. 40% of consumers say they have purchased something more expensive than they originally planned because their experience was personalised.
    • 19. 51% of marketers say that segmenting an email list is one of their most effective personalisation tactics
    • 20. 69% of B2C strategists have the ability to calculate the revenue generated by e-marketing, compared to 48% of B2B marketers.
    • 21. Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of e-marketing revenue
    • 22. Emails that include social sharing buttons have 158% higher click-through rate than those which do not
    • 23. 86% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with at least monthly, and 15% would like to get them daily
    • 24. Basket abandonment emails generally have a 40% open rate
    • 25. 54% of marketers say increasing engagement rate is their top email marketing priority
    • 26. 11 am has the highest clickthrough rate for email sends
    • 27. Over 70% of mobile purchasing decisions are influenced by promotional emails
    • 28. A third of UK businesses say that social media as an effective technique to grow email lists.
    • 29. Almost half of marketers say they sometimes test alternate subject lines to optimise email performance
    • 30. We send approx 102.6 trillion emails every year!
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