Where in the world does our marketing stand?
“Where do we stand?”, is a question that all startups need to ask in order to assess their performance. At Mailjet, we compare year over year sales, web traffic and market position for our customers.
This helps our users benchmark where their individual email campaign results stand in relation to their industry on average. With that, we thought it would be of interest to share how major industries are using email across the globe. We’ve analysed sending activity of a sample of Mailjet users who have sent a combined 29.4 million marketing emails.
Financial Services: Heavyweight email senders
Above are the the top ten industries sending the highest volume of emails, with Financial & Insurance services in the lead.
At first glance, it may be interesting that Financial & Insurance companies send more than Marketing and Advertising. However, we should keep the nature of these marketing emails in mind. When broken down further, our data shows that Financial & Insurance services send more transactional email.
There are a few possibilities for why this may be the case, financial service companies have a wider range of customers in age and have only recently begun to move away from more traditional methods of marketing. In fact, only 33 percent of banking and financial service companies have acquired a customer through Facebook, compared to 73 percent of retail and consumer goods companies. Email is relatively easy to setup and drives the highest return of all digital channels.
Transactional email builds trust:
A good transactional email is short, informative and delivered promptly when expected. It directly serves a customer’s need, such as a password reset or monthly billing statement. You can win a customer’s trust when you weave in an email that adds unexpected value, such as a reminder when their bank account balance is low or thanking them for their last visit to the bank.
Transactional email has higher deliverability:
Financial companies often send highly sensitive information and need to ensure that the customer gets their eyes on the content. Transactional email typically sees a higher deliverability rate than newsletters.
ISPs view transactional emails more positively than newsletters or bulk emails – they don’t tend to land in the spam folder as much – because they know that customers tend to expect these transactional emails. The average open rate for transactional email is four times higher than that of newsletter emails.
USA: Always in the inbox
When looking at which countries send the highest average volume of marketing emails per user, USA sends over six times more than France. In fact, USA sends the same amount of email as UK, Germany and France put together!
This may seem a bit shocking at first, however considering that USA has a population of 318M whilst France, Germany and the UK have a combined population of 210M, Western Europe seems to be sending more emails per capita. These findings are just what we see from our customer sample, not to be used as a representation for the greater international scene, but it’s certainly something to consider when messaging a diverse range of customers.
One thing you can consider is segmenting by country and messaging Europe based customers less frequently.
Industry x Country
Now, let’s break this down a little bit further to see which industries are sending the most by country. Telecom came in the lead for the US, Healthcare for UK, Entertainment Gaming in France and Software & SaaS in Germany.
It’s good to ask yourself from time to time “Where do we stand?”, but don’t forget to look inwards when reflecting as well. Consider your past email performance, your business goals, and ultimately your customers when setting a benchmark. Even if your industry averages an email a day, your customer may be quite content just checking their inbox once a week. Above all, stick to what works best for you.
