• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 5, 2021

Conversion rates peaked by over 100% in 2020 — for email, SMS and push, all three, according to Omnisend’s 2020 Ecommerce Statistics Report: Email, SMS & Push Messaging Insights For 2021.

Email promotional campaigns experienced a 108% hike in conversions for DTC brands, while SMS rates saw a 102% increase. 

And web push notifications drew a 28% conversion rate — almost a 500% boost. 

SMS message sends grew by 378% more, and push notifications grew by 1000% YoY.  

Meanwhile, automated email messages drew a 29.8% conversion rate — for a 95% increase YoY — with 29% all email orders coming through this source. Yet automated emails accounted for only 1.8% of total email sends. 

The highest-converting automated emails were welcome emails (51.94%), cart abandonment (33.89%) and lapsed-purchaser messages (21.27%).  

Cart abandonment conversions grew by 21% over the first quarter. In contrast, post-purchase emails shot up by 18.21%, followed by product abandonment (17.53%), browse abandonment 17.32% and birthday 10.57%.

Product abandonments emails led in open rates, pulling an average 37.75%, followed by post-purchase emails (34.01%) and browse abandonment (33.99%). 

But birthday emails dominated when it came to click rates, drawing a 23.95% CTR versus 20.88% for cart abandonment. 

As for mail campaigns, open rates totaled 10.16% in 2020 versus 8.33% in 2019. But click-through rates fell from 15.29% in 2019 to 12.15% in 2020. Email campaign conversions also dropped — from 6.49% in 2019 to 3.0f7%. 

Meanwhile, transactional email order confirmations drew a 54.32% open rate, a 20.95% click rate and a 13.55% conversion rate. Shipping confirmations pulled a 60.55% open rate, 43.62% click-through rate and 4.51% conversion rate. 

SMS messages generated a 10.63% click rate in 2020 —  up from 10.08% in 2019, and a 2.65 conversion rate, versus 1.31% in the prior year,.

Push notifications pulled a lower open/view rate in 2020 — 52.86% compared with 62.36% in the prior year. But conversion rates jumped to 28.10%, up from 4.86% in 2019.

The study concludes: “If email marketing is a car, email automation is a Ferrari. With automated emails driving 29% of all email marketing sales (with less than 2% of email sends), companies can realistically and significantly increase their sales without increasing their workload."

Omnisend analyzed over 10 billion email messages and more than 31 million SMS and web push messages sent via the Omnisend platform in 2019 and 2020.