• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, September 17, 2020

Email metrics exploded during the second quarter, judging by Email, SMS, and Push Message Statistics, a study by Omnisend.

For example, promotional campaigns pulled an overall open rate of 10.85% -- a 29.37% improvement over the 8.39% seen in the same period in 2019. 

This reflected the fact that “consumers gravitated toward trusted marketing channels such as email when doing their online shopping” during the pandemic, the study notes. 

Promotional click rates declined to 14.22%, a 9.5% decrease from 15.71%. However, this can be seen as an improvement, given that the decrease from January through April was over 17%. 

What’s more, the average promotional conversion rate rose by 88% to 5.37%, up from 2.85% in the second quarter last year. 

But SMS may be catching up — these messages pulled a 14.8% click rate, a 43% lift over the prior year, and a 2.13% conversion rate, a 35% increase.  

Moreover, the percentage of SMS messages sent versus the number of emails was 0.17%, compared to 0.09% in the prior year.

Meanwhile, automated email trigger messages did even better, showing a 178.6% advantage in open rates over scheduled promotional campaigns:

• Campaigns — 10.85%
• Product abandonment — 51.64%
• Cart abandonment — 30.56%
• Browse abandonment — 26.34%
• Post Purchase — 24.58% 
• Welcome — 23.8% 
• Birthday — 23.22% 
• Lapsed-Purchaser — 22.11%

The differential was similar with email click rates: 

• Campaigns — 14.22% 
• Birthday — 24.08% 
• Cart abandonment — 20.85%
• Welcome — 19.74%
• Product Abandonment — 18.83% 
• Post-Purchase — 16.33% 
• Browse Abandonment — 15.76%
• Lapsed-Purchaser — 15.50% 

And conversion rates? They totaled:

Campaigns—5.37%

Welcome—48.35%

• Cart Abandonment — 25.37%
• Lapsed-Purchaser — 20.96%
• Post-Purchase — 17.06%
• Browse Abandonment — 16.06% 
• Product Abandonment — 14.22%
• Birthday — 10.45%

Then there was transactional message performance.  

Shipping confirmations drew an average open rat of 50.95%, click rate of 45.77% and conversion rate of 3.02%. 

Order confirmations generated a 45.71% open rate, 25.35% click rate an a 8.61% conversion. 

As for push notifications, these saw a 16% decline in open rates to a still impressive 56.6%. The click rate his 3.9% an the conversion rate16.5%, a184% lift YoY, the report states.   

The explanation for the open rate drop might be that more DTC brands are using push, resulting in an increase in testing and experimentation of use cases. This could lead to lower overall metrics, the study states. 

The study concludes that email, SMS and push are owned channels, meaning that people willingly sign up for them and are “naturally more receptive to receiving brand messages. 

Omnisend analyzed 4 billion emails  and 1.8 million SMS and push messages sent from the firm’s marketing platform during Q2.