Marketers shouldexpect 2.6% of recipients to click a link in emails sent, according to an analysis of over 30 billion emails sent in 2019 by worldwide clients of email marketing platform Campaign Monitor.

Food & beverage along with automotive and aerospace brands perform the worse. Both verticals saw an average Click-Through Rates (CTR )of 1.2% in 2019, less than half the average level across all categories. Automotive and aerospace also recorded the largest decline in CTR, dropping from 2.2% in 2018. Food and beverage fell from 1.7%.

The best performing emails came from government (4.1%), followed by real estate (3.6%) and agriculture-related brands (3.5%). Government was up strongly, from 3.0% in 2018, while real estate rose by 0.5 percentage points (pp) and agriculture-related dipped 0.2pp.

Nearly one-third of consumers say weekly marketing emails is the digital channel most likely to influence their purchase decision, marginally behind search. Which emails consumers open and engage with can also provide quick customer feedback for brands.

While recent data privacy regulations have reduced the amount of emails sent, this has allowed marketers to focus on the audiences most engaged with the brand.

For marketers looking to improve their click-through rate, hyper-personalisation is one possible approach as financial services provider American Express and retailer Kroger have found. Integrating email marketing into other channels is also vital, as luxury retail brand Jo Maloned in improving its repurchase sales. Email marketers in Asia Pacific would benefit from alerting consumers to their abandoned carts – currently only one-in-three do so.

Credit: WARC