Email marketing offers unrivalled effectiveness in nurturing consumers through difficult times and its relevance to consumers continues to rise, with clickthrough rates doubling over the past two years.
That is the stand-out conclusion of the DMA’s latest Consumer Email Tracker 2023 report, supported by Deployteq, which quizzed over 2,000 consumers about the emails they receive from brands and how they choose to interact with them.
Consumers continue to rank email first – ahead of all other marketing channels – for receiving brand messages about discounts, offers and sales (64% rank it first); new products/services (53%); and advice, information, and reviews (44%).
The number of consumers stating they find email brand messages useful has doubled from 15% in 2021 to 32% in 2023. Click-through rates have also risen across all types of communications, including emails that include offers, discounts and sales (up from 24% to 46%), advice and information (up from 19% to 34%), products and services (21% to 40%) and order confirmations (up from 29% to 43%).
DMA insight director Ian Gibbs said: “Email remains a key part of a consumer’s omnichannel journey. Depending on how you view it, the cost-of-living crisis has either presented a crisis in marketing effectiveness, or it has created an environment of profound opportunity for marketers.
“While squeezed consumer wallets have made it harder to elicit a specific acquisition or sale in response to marketing comms, the need to nurture customers through difficult times becomes a role of fundamental importance for brands.”
The rise of hybrid and remote working appears to have accelerated the use of professional email accounts to receive brand communications. In 2021, 50% of consumers revealed they did not have a work email address – that figure now stands at just 23% in 2023.
Some 37% of consumers now keep personal and marketing emails separate by using different inboxes, a significant jump from 23% in 2021 (+14%).
Interestingly, 79% of respondents use their mobile to receive email communications from brands, shops, and websites (up from 62% in 2021) – ahead of using desktop/ laptops, with their use down to just 37% this year (from 64% in 2021).
Deployteq marketing director Pauline Bull commented: “Mobile is more prominent than ever in this year’s statistics. We see trends even more in favour of mobile as internet data becomes more accessible and the need for immediate gratification rises; it’s easier to check emails on a phone than on a laptop.
“Having a user-friendly platform that spans across multiple channels such as WhatsApp, mobile app, SMS, and email help to tailor your communications directly to customer preferences in a few clicks is now more important than ever.”
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