The imminent death of email has been greatly exaggerated

It’s quite ironic. Over the years, we have helped many of our clients with their email newsletters. We’ve helped build their lists, we’ve helped test what works best for their objectives, we’ve designed them, we’ve sent them, we’ve reported on their success. Over those years, I presented seminars across the UK and in Europe and written in industry journals. But the irony is that we’ve never produced one for our own clients.

Earlier this year, we did a phone survey with a cross section of our clients and many requested a newsletter sharing insights, the lessons learnt and the experience we’ve gained working with over 200 clients from the arts and entertainment sector.

But newsletters are so last decade aren’t they? Before twitter, I remember being told that RSS feeds would replace the junk in our in-box. Since then, social media, instant messaging, push notifications and other real time communication platforms have all been cited as threats. Well, research suggests that that past reports of the death of email has been greatly exaggerated. Here are just a few recent statistics to suggest otherwise:

• Millennials are the age group most likely to check their email from bed (70%), from the bathroom (57%), or while driving (27%). (adobe)
• 75% of Gmail’s 900 million users access their accounts on mobile devices. (Source: TechCrunch)
• 33% of email opens occurred on an iPhone, while Gmail, second to the iPhone for opens, only accounted for 15% of those opens. (Source: Litmus)

However, one statistic made me pause. According to Sign-up.to’s 2016 UK Benchmark report, we are one of the worst performing sectors with open rates under 20% compared to other sectors reaching 37.2%.