Litmus is out with a new update to its State of Email Engagement Report.
Here are a few interesting findings from their research on more than 10 billion emails worldwide.
Where People Open Email
Most emails are now opened in Gmail, making it the top inbox provider, with Apple iPhone falling to second place.
According to this report, 42% of emails are opened on a mobile device or tablet. However, it’s worth noting that other reports put that number much higher:
61.9% of email opens occurred on mobile, 9.8% on desktop and 28.3% in a webmail client. – Adestra “Top 10 email clients” (July 2019)
About 3 in 5 consumers check their email on the go (mobile) and 75% of say they use their smartphones most often to check email. – Fluent “The Inbox report, Consumer perceptions of email” (2018)
The bottom line for nonprofits: Write and design your emails to be read and clicked on via a phone.
When People Open Email
In the U.S., most emails are read in the morning. However, mobile opens are more spread out during the day, with desktop opens peaking in the morning and then trailing off. In Canada, email reading falls off quickly in the afternoon on all platforms.
The bottom line for nonprofits: Try to send in the morning. However, you can also send in the afternoon as long as you ensure that your email is very mobile friendly.
How People Open Email
Now we get to the more interesting data on email engagement, or what people do once they open your email.
The average time spent reading an email is 13.4 seconds.
The good news: once opened, 61% of emails are being read for 8 seconds or more. Now, that may sound like a really short amount of time! But skimming only takes 2-8 seconds, and a glance is 2 seconds or less.
Mobile engagement is good too: 66% of emails opened on mobile are read for more than 8 seconds.
The bottom line for nonprofits: If you can get that email opened, odds are good people are taking in at least some of the content. (I will share advice on how to get your emails opened next week.)
Here are two other engagement stats for you:
- Average print rate: 0.32% (1 email is printed for every 313 opens)
- Average forward rate: 0.59% (1 email is forwarded for every 170 opens)
Would you like to learn more about building and maintaining a healthy, engaged email list? We’re hosting two webinars on that topic on October 1 & 3, 2019.
