• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, September 26, 2016

Good news for email marketers -- the highly respected annual Mobile Consumer Survey from Deloitte shows that email use is soaring. OK -- well, you actually have to look past the headline that people are checking their smartphones in the night and don't use them to make calls any more. But if you delve a little deeper, you'll discover that the researchers have found that just under one in two smartphone users were active email users last year. This year, it's very nearly three in four. 

In other words, the favourite nugget thrown out there by any futuristic marketing gurus that email is dead is once again, itself, dead on arrival. Should you hear it at a conference and the mic is passed around at the end, it just might be a useful statistic to throw out there to counter the typical chat about everything going in to other channels.

While you're at it, there are also some interesting findings via SendGrid's annual report on email engagement that would appear to at first beggar belief. The odd thing is that email send rates are going up, but then so open rates and click-throughs are holding their own too. The average brand sends out roughly 10 emails per month with an open rate between 14% and 27%, with click-throughs at around 2% to 3%. Retailers tend to send nearly double that amount of emails per month but still enjoy an average of a 4% click through.

Interestingly, half of social, travel and retail emails are opened on mobile devices, suggesting those without a mobile-first, adaptive email strategy will suffer.

So, you would think that so many emails from so many brands would put people off opening and clicking through. However, engagement rates are not dipping. This leads us back to Deloitte's finding that nearly three in four are now regular, active email users on their mobile phone, compared to nearly one in two last year. Put simply, mobile is opening up the market. The very device we're being told by gurus will see us all switch to messaging services and chat bots has, in fact, enabled mobile email to hold its own.