The State of Email Engagement Benchmark Report

Introduction

Email is still the go-to marketing channel for many organizations—and with good reason. Studies show that a vast majority of consumers prefer email for brand communications, and current projections indicate that by 2021, there will be more than 4.1 billion email users worldwide. Clearly, organizations must prioritize email to maintain its effectiveness.

Engagement is the key to getting email into subscriber inboxes. This relationship to deliverability made engagement a logical next candidate for study.

Return Path and Demand Metric partnered again to study engagement and its relationship to email deliverability.

Over 200 marketers contributed responses to the December 2018 email engagement study survey. 

The data collected provides fresh insights into the importance of email as a marketing channel; looks at the use of various strategies, technologies, and approaches in use to improve engagement; and concludes with advice about best practices for email engagement.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Executive Summary
3. Where Email Stands
4. Engagement and Deliverability
5. Baseline Email Metrics
6. Email Engagement Factors
7. Artificial Intelligence
8. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
9. The Bottom Line on Email Engagement
10. Acknowledgements
11. Appendix: Survey Background

Research Methodology

This Demand Metric The State of Email Engagement Benchmark Study survey was administered online during the period of Dec. 10, 2018 to Jan 21, 2019. 256 responses were collected, 221 of which were complete enough for inclusion in the analysis. Only valid or correlated findings are shared in this report. The representativeness of this study’s results depends on the similarity of the sample to environments in which this survey data is used for comparison or guidance.