Report: Marketers Seeing Customers Spend Less Time Reading Emails

Marketers have relied on email marketing as a way to reach out to their customers for years. Now, new research suggests that they may want to focus on timing their emails more precisely, as customers spend less time reading them.

Litmus recently published the “2021 State of Email Engagement” report, and statistics showed that, on average, customers now spend just 10 seconds reading an email. This is a 15% decrease from 2020, and a full 3.4 seconds less than the recorded average in 2018. In the first quarter of 2021, customers spent an average of 9.8 seconds on an email when reading it on a mobile device. By the third quarter of 2021, this average fell to 9.6 seconds.

To increase the likelihood that customers will read an email, marketers may want to focus on the time they send it. About 21.2% of all opens happen between 9 a.m. and noon local time in the U.S.

Marketers Benefiting From Growing Interest in Email

Despite some of the documented challenges of leveraging email, previous research suggests that marketers are still seeing their subscription lists grow.

Cordial conducted its “Cross-Channel Marketing Study,” and data indicated that over the past year, the majority of marketers (61%) have documented a growth in their email subscription list. Nearly 31% claimed that their list expanded by up to 25%, while 22% said that it grew by between 25-50%. About 8% said that their list expanded by between 51-100%.

In the coming year, 82% of marketers intend to boost the number of emails they send to their subscribers.