New year's resolutions that abound with the change of year, so do predictions of what lies ahead/trends to watch. So this year, after 7 years of working in email, I couldn't help but throw my hat in the ring (better late than never)! Coming out of the december release of our 2019 email benchmark and engagement study - a combination of twilio sendgrid sender analysis and comprehensive consumer analysis across generations - I noticed a few trends that I believe will be particularly relevant to shippers in 2020. In no particular order, the 4 email trends I think senders should watch for in 2020 are:an increase in the frequency of emails openness of recipient to investigation in light of privacy/tracking issuesdecreased recipient
Interest/engagement with embedded video email becomes a source of information increase in email frequency sending frequency is company mailing list something we constantly analyze at twilio sendgrid. How open are recipients to streaming email into their personal inboxes and how do senders maintain trust and balance? Over the past 3 years, we've seen a noticeable drop in the median monthly send rate for senders, from 9.8 emails per month per sender in 2016 to 7.0 emails per month in 2018. However, we saw a tidal shift in 2019, with the send rate increasing to
8.3 emails per month, the highest since 2019. This surprised me. We always talk about the inbox as a sacred space, which senders need to invite themselves into the inbox and be aware of the boundaries. And if the frequency is too high, we typically see a corresponding drop in open rate with any increase in send rate. But what's even more interesting, if you look at the next graph, is that recipients are actually more open (especially in retail) to receiving emails every day from senders. A staggering 37% of respondents in our consumer survey said they would be willing to receive emails once a day from a company with products they are interested in. What this tells me is that recipients are open to more frequent communication as long as shippers live up to their end of the bargain - offering value in the form of discounts, thought leadership, worthy product updates , etc