Report: Marketers See Benefits to Email Personalization and Segmentation
As marketers personalize and segment their email marketing campaigns, new research shows that email response rates are on the rise.
The Relevancy Group and OneSpot recently conducted “The Email Individualization Imperative” report to gauge how different strategies have been working for marketers utilizing email. The statistics showed that marketers had an average open rate of 28 percent for personalized promotional emails and newsletters in the second quarter of 2018. This is compared to 27 percent for the second quarter of 2017, and 25 percent for the second quarter of 2016.
In addition, the average click-through rate for these types of emails was 17 percent in Q2 2018. This is an increase from 16 percent in Q2 2017, and 14 percent in Q2 2016.
The authors of the report credit increased adoption of personalization and segmentation for the upward trend.
“Until recently many senders have treated email as primarily a broadcast channel, loading lists and ‘blasting’ their most popular content to broad swaths of their audience,” wrote the authors of the report. “Some experienced great success with this broadcast approach, but many more learned that by segmenting their audience and then targeting these segments with messaging that was specifically relevant to each group, they could drive higher response rates, and recipients would tolerate a greater volume of overall messaging – a double bonus for senders.”
Personalized Subject Lines Yield More Email Marketing Success
Previous research indicates that personalizing subject lines can prove beneficial for marketers launching email marketing campaigns as well.
According to the “Subject Line Benchmarks: How Length and Personalization Impact Email Performance Across Message Type and Industry” report from Yes Lifecycle Marketing, personalized subject lines generated 50 percent higher open rates in Q2 2017, as well as 58 percent higher click-to-open rates. In addition, these emails saw 2.5 times the unique click rates, compared to subject lines without personalization.