• by Jess Nelson , July 20, 2016

The majority of retail marketers plan to increase email volume this year, according to a recently released study by research firm Bronto, which polled 300 online retail marketers on the effectiveness of their email campaigns.

Some 64% of online retail marketers plan to increase email volume in 2016, according to the study, while a third of marketers do not plan to make any change to the volume of marketing emails they send, and 4% of marketers plan to decrease the total amount of emails sent.

Alternative email marketing tactics to consider, according to Bronto, include cart recovery emails, product status change emails, promotional content in transactional emails and happy birthday or reminder emails.

Some 60% of marketers polled by Bronto responded that cart recovery emails were a highly effective retail email tactic, 44% favored birthday or reminder emails, 35% responded that product status change emails were extremely effective and 30% asserted that promotional offers in transactional emails was a very effective email marketing strategy. 

Not surprisingly, Bronto’s research points to increasing competition for a subscriber’s attention. About 215 billion emails are sent every day, according to The Radicati Group, with the research firm estimating consumers will receive an average of 90 emails a day by the end of the year.

By 2020, The Radicati Group estimates consumers will receive 96 emails a day, and as daily email volume increases, fewer consumers will respond to emails. While consumers sent an average of 33 business emails a day in 2016, that number is predicted to drop to 30 by 2020.