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Report: Automated Email Open Rates and Conversion Skyrocket during Pandemic

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Ecommerce marketing automation platform Omnisend, recently published its Email & SMS Marketing Stats & Trends Report (Q2 2020) . The results of the study provide interesting insights on e-commerce consumer behavior towards email, SMS and push marketing messages during the pandemic. One insight is that consumers gravitated toward trusted channels such as email marketing when doing their online shopping.

Omnisend analyzed email send data for over 2.4 billion emails sent from the Omnisend marketing platform during Q2 2020. They also looked at more than 1.8 million SMS and push messages sent through the Omnisend platform. The data below includes sends, opens, clicks, and conversions from April 1st through June 30th for both 2019 and 2020.

Email Marketing Performance

Email Open Rates:

Email open rates increased year-over-year for both promotional campaigns and automated messages during the second quarter. Promotional campaigns (traditional scheduled messages) registered an overall open rate of 10.85%*, a 29.37% lift compared to the same period in 2019.

This increased performance is not entirely surprising. As we saw in the COVID-19 email marketing metric report, when consumers increased their online shopping they turned to trusted marketing channels like email as a source of product discovery and awareness.

When consumers increased their online shopping they turned to trusted marketing channels like email as a source of product discovery and awareness.

Email Rates

Online DTC brands who don’t send these types of messages because their ecommerce platform isn’t integrated with their email provider are missing a huge growth opportunity.

Type of Automation

Open Rate

Lift Over Campaigns

Product Abandonment

51.64%

375.90%

Cart Abandonment

30.58%

181.84%

Browse Abandonment

26.34%

142.75%

Post-Purchase

24.58%

126.52%

Welcome

23.80%

119.34%

Birthday

23.22%

114.00%

Lapsed-Purchaser

22.11%

103.77%

* List management, send cadence, and the use of Booster sends (remails) on a per-client basis impacts promotional campaign open rates—often resulting in lower overall numbers. For instance, it is common for remailed messages, because they specifically target non-openers, to receive roughly half of the open rate as the initial send—therefore reducing the overall open rate.

Email Click Rates:

While promotional campaigns saw a decrease in click rates, the same cannot be said for automated messages. Automated messages generated a 21.24% click rate, marking a 15.37% YoY lift over automations in 2019.

Email Rates

When comparing click rates in Q2 of this year, automated messages see an improvement of 49.36% over scheduled promotional campaigns, with birthday, cart abandonment, and welcome emails leading the way.

Type of Automation

Click Rate

Lift Over Campaigns

Birthday

24.08%

69.33%

Cart Abandonment

20.85%

46.62%

Welcome

19.74%

38.82%

Product Abandonment

18.83%

32.41%

Post-Purchase

16.33%

14.87%

Browse Abandonment

15.76%

10.85%

Lapsed-Purchaser

15.50%

8.98%

Email Marketing Conversion Rates:

Overall, the conversion rate for promotional email marketing campaigns was 5.37%—an 88% year-over-year lift. Maybe more promising for brands is that the conversion rate increased each month of the quarter, hinting at an increased reliance on not only ecommerce but email marketing as a primary purchase channel.

This behavior is indicative of intent-based shopping. Instead of consumers clicking on an email and casually browsing the website, emails had to ‘earn’ their clicks—but once the subscriber clicked on the email their intent to purchase was higher.

Email Rates

Most importantly, automated messages drove 26% of the email marketing conversions while accounting for less than 2% of the email sends. Online brands should look to automation as a major component for increasing their sales.

Type of Automation

Conversion Rate

Lift Over Campaigns

Welcome

48.35%

799.88%

Cart Abandonment

25.37%

372.28%

Lapsed-Purchaser

20.96%

290.08%

Post-Purchase

17.06%

217.54%

Browse Abandonment

16.06%

198.88%

Product Abandonment

14.22%

164.60%

Birthday

10.45%

94.46%

 

Overall Campaigns and Automation Performance:

Scheduled promotional campaigns made up 98% of the email volume sent during Q2 2020. These campaigns saw YoY increases in open and conversion rates, while click rates slightly decreased.

Campaign Email Performance Q2 2020

The worst-performing automated message, in terms of conversion rate, still saw a rate nearly double that of promotional campaigns.

The numbers don’t lie — automated lifecycle messages are powerful sales enablers for ecommerce businesses. Even though these messages accounted for less than 2% of the email marketing volume sent during Q2, they generated 26% of the conversions. In fact, the worst-performing automated message, in terms of conversion rate, still saw a rate nearly double that of promotional campaigns. Online businesses who fail to utilize automated lifecycle messages are limiting their growth potential.

Automation Message performance Q2 2020

For more insights including Transactional Performance, SMS and Push Message performance as well as E-commerce takeaways, please click here. 

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