Every 2-3 years, HubSpot (a company well known for inbound marketing software) publishes its Science of Email Marketing report. What sets this report apart from others is that it doesn’t just list numbers and set benchmarks. Instead, HubSpot highlights trends and provides pertinent data to help small businesses make the right choices for their own email marketing efforts.
Recently, the folks at Market Domination Media collaborated with HubSpot to create this swanky infographic, based on data from the 2014 Science of Email Marketing Report. It provides some really nice insights into just how customers read and filter their emails, and how they react to email that is unsolicited and unwanted.
Some interesting takeaways:
- People use a wide variety of platforms to access email. Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) account for 39 percent of users, while web clients (Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.) account for at least another 33 percent.
- More and more people are using smartphones and other mobile devices to check their email, so you need to make sure your message is optimized for the smaller screens.
- Don’t bombard your readers with a wall of bland text. Tart those emails up a bit with some HTML.
- Most consumers use filters to weed out spam and other unwanted emails. If you want to get through, you need to 1) make sure you’re sending to people who want your emails (e.g. an opt-in subscriber list), and 2) make sure you’re sending them content they want and can use (instead of just advertising).
- Wording in your subject line *does* matter, but there are no hard, fast rules about what works and what doesn’t. Rather than treating subject lines as a riddle to be solved, you should regard them as an ongoing experiment to figure out what engages your customers. Tweak them, test them, and then tweak them some more.
Infographic by: Market Domination Media
