Last month, results of a Webtrends survey polling the email habits of 2,000 British consumers over the age of 18 revealed that on average people have 260 unopened emails sitting in their inbox. And
56% of these unread messages were from brands that consumers opted-in to receive communications from.
So why are consumers choosing not to open more than half of the branded emails they receive?
John Fleming, marketing director for Europe and Asia at Webtrends, commented in The Telegraph: "As consumers, we’re happy to sign up to receive updates from brands, but only bother to
open the ones we find relevant."
Marketers have been tussling with the challenge of maintaining the relevance of email ever since its inception. You can carefully conceive the message, be
meticulous crafting its look and feel, optimise the design to avoid the junk folders, and use every ounce of knowledge, experience and data to schedule the campaign at a precise point in time deemed
most likely to result in it being opened. But still open and response rates fall below par.
One of the big problems is, people don’t always open emails when we want them to! So, whilst
the email may have been a highly relevant and personalised approach at the time it was sent, if it isn’t seen in a timely fashion, then the greater the chance that relevance will have subsided.
After all, it is no fun reading an email from your favourite store that it is having a 24 hour sale, 24 hours after it has finished!
The ideal situation for both the email marketer and the
consumer is an email that is compiled with content that is “real-time relevant,” crucially not at the point at which it arrives in the inbox, but at the point at which it is opened.
This may sound like a flight of fantasy but it is now becoming a reality.
For example, consider a format, now being beta-tested, which uses images rather than subject lines (typically the
first and biggest hurdle to navigate in the quest to getting the attention of the recipient) in its promotions tab, to encourage the consumer to open an email. And this image (and the subsequent
content of the email behind it) is not static, it is dynamic. What consumers see is an image that will be real-time-relevant to them, whether it is the latest product they viewed on the e-commerce
site, a special offer based on their browsing history, or crowd-sourced popular items.
Email is still one of the best ways of directly engaging with consumers with campaign messages. Such a
fresh approach to real-time relevant email marketing indicates that email’s strength shows no sign of diminishing. In fact, the opposite may well be the case. The survey shows that consumers are
indeed signing up for email. So address the disconnect and make every email relevant for better response rates, which ultimately lead to greater revenues.