Given that, globally, we’ll be sending 376 billion emails a day by 2025, email may seem like an ineffective way for marketers to reach customers. But that’s not the case.
According to the Data & Marketing Association’s (DMA) Marketer Email Tracker 2019 Report, email remains an extremely powerful channel. 91% of marketers said it was their key tool — compared to 83% for social media.
And customers spend more as a result. ROI stands at £42 for every pound spent, also according to the DMA’s 2019 report.
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But not all marketing emails are created equal. Some have a much higher probability of being opened than others. Factors that can affect whether a customer opens something or trashes it include the time of day you sent it, the subject line, the type of message it is and the email’s tone of voice.
What type of marketing email is opened the most? Happy birthday email with a special offer. According to data from Square’s email marketing platform, automated birthday offers generate the highest engagement, with open rates and redemptions more than 2.5 times higher than the average across all types of email campaigns.
That makes sense if you think about it. Birthday email is highly targeted and more personally relevant to each customer who receives it. That makes them more likely to get noticed than, say, a massive blast about a sale.
In fact, personalised automated email — like welcome messages, birthday offers, and winback campaigns — far outperforms one-off campaigns to your entire customer list. On average, email open rates for automated offers with Square’s email marketing tool are 1.7 times higher than blast campaigns containing offers. They also have a 2.3 times higher redemption rate within seven days of the email send date.
That doesn’t mean that blast campaigns don’t have strategic value for marketers. People who sign up for an email list usually do so because they want to know about things like sales or news announcements. But for businesses looking to cut through the email noise on a consistent basis, “happy birthday!” is where it’s at.