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33 years of Email what engagement works

by bernt & torsten

Do you know that 33 years ago email was invented and it has taken over the way we communicate today, SendGrid has revealed the results of a study on global email engagement?

SendGrid collected data over two 10-day periods in 2014 and 2015 respectively, with a data set spanning more than 10 billion emails sent.

What SendGrid found from the data include:

• Apple-manufactured devices retain the crown as the most used platform to access emails. Nearly half of email opens in the US (45%) tracked by SendGrid has been accessed on Mac desktops, Macbooks, iPhones and iPads.
• Windows-based devices are the second-fastest-growing segment for email opens globally. On average, emails opened per day on Windows devices in the last year, accounted for a 3.39% increase over the prior year.
• Android and Linux based devices are the two fastest-growing segments for email opens in the US, growing 71.4% in the last year.
• Canada is the largest region for email readership, representing 7.9% of email opens in the last year. Australia is third in email readership, with 7.0% of email opens in the last year.

SendGrid analyzed 5 million unique subject headers in nearly 18 million emails. This is the fact SendGrid found:

1. Shorten Subject Headers: While 7 words are the most common subject line word length (14.0% of subject lines), 3-word subject lines (1.6% of subject lines) have the highest engagement rates (21.2%, compared to 17.2% overall and 15.8% for 7-word subject lines).
   • Measuring engagement rates by a number of character lines tells a similar story: longer subject lines have lower engagement rates. Past 15 characters, each extra character is correlated with a 0.03% absolute decrease in engagement rate (or about 1% per 33 characters).
2. Choose Your Buzzwords Carefully: Recipients prefer certain words over others.  Subject lines referring to “yesterday” and“tomorrow” have higher engagement rates (20.5% and 22.3%, respectively)  than “today” (11.8%).
   • Subject lines with “soon” have higher engagement rates (21.9%) versus subject lines referring to now  “now”
   • Email subject lines that use the word “free” have significantly lower engagement rates (13.1% versus 17.2% for “free”-free subject lines).
3. Eliminate Links and Hashtags: Subject lines that contain URLs do poorly, with average engagement rates of 9.9% (compared to 17.2% for subject lines that do not contain a URL). Subject lines with URLs in them are rare (fewer than 0.4% of emails).
   • Subject lines that contain #hashtags do poorly, with average engagement rates of 10.5% for subject lines with a single hashtag (compared to 17.2% for subject lines that do not contain a #hashtag). Thankfully, emails with hashtags in them are rare (fewer than 0.2% of emails).

The full press release can be found here.