This change comes among several others including an overall increase in email engagement as consumers sought new ways to engage with brands they could no longer visit in person, or to seek out relevant information about news and current events.
One thing consumers didn't like about 2020's email changes? Missives about the pandemic. While messaging focused on brands' response to the pandemic were met eagerly in the first half of the year, by the second half of 2020, consumers tired of this messaging tactic and simply wanted sales and product information from their brands of choice.
Some interesting takeaways from Acoustic's report include:
• Email open rates were 14.8% in January, but 15.4% in December of 2020
• Global email open rates increased 6.5% between June and December of 2020
• Click through rates were 1.4% in January, and steady at 1.7% in December of 2020
More data from Acoustic's 2020 Email Marketing Benchmark Report can be found here.
Meanwhile, new data out from Barracuda indicates that while more consumers are continuing to turn to email so are fraudsters. According to their new report there has been a significant surge in security incidents for most businesses over the past year. The good news is that IT training is helping more employees to spot fraudulent/phishing emails before they're clicked upon.
Researchers found a 70% improvement in employee reporting of phishing emails after training from IT departments. They further found that most phishing emails are sitting in employee inboxes for about 80 hours prior to discovery. Most phishing emails are found when IT departments seek out threats to the company (67%); only about one-quarter of email threats are reports from the employee to IT. This could indicate a need for additional training so that employees can better spot malicious emails.
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