Everlytic Roadshow affirms email is far from 'dead'

The notion that “email is dead” has been put to rest by SA's largest digital messaging platform, Everlytic, which assured industry professionals that email remains a powerful and growing marketing medium. 

The company shared this key finding during its recent 2023 Everlytic Roadshow, which comprised three events: two physical events, held in Joburg and Cape Town, and one webinar. The roadshow discussed some of the valuable engagement data insights revealed in Everlytic’s latest Email Marketing Benchmarks Report. More than 10-billion emails sent by South African businesses over a two-year period were analysed for this report.

Everlytic’s executive head of sales and marketing, Louise Krog, told the roadshow attendees: “Email is a serious medium and will continue to grow. Just look at email in your own life: your inbox is the backbone of how you govern your daily life.”

Krog presented a graph showing the company’s open rate data from 2014 to 2022. Focusing on the findings between 2020 and 2022, she showed how engagement started to increase in 2020 when people were huddled in their houses during the Covid-19 pandemic. The open rate increased across every industry and reached an all-time high in 2022. 

“If you look at the average open rate across all the emails that were sent, it increased by 17% between 2020 and 2022 to 29.28%. It’s interesting to see that the industry with the highest open rate is hospitality at 35.31%. They’ve also had the biggest jump — of 49% — since 2020. This is massive.” 

Overall, click-through rates have increased by 1% since 2020, with the business and consulting services industry leading the pack. 

“The click-to-open rate helps you measure how you've enticed action from the audience, and it's considered the best way to measure and track the effectiveness. We are going to use this way of measuring and tracking more because it’s linked to email security.” 

Speaking on the new email privacy changes, Everlytic’s head of direct sales, David Sepulveda, said the report found a high upward trend in the use of webmail applications. “A reason could be recipients are using more Web-based communication such as Gmail, Apple Mail or Office 365. Or it could involve mail privacy protection,” he said. 

“It’s a new protection policy where the host servers cache the content before the recipient opens [the mail]. If the content is cached, then on our side, it appears to have been opened.”

Sepulveda advised the following three ways to adjust to the new email privacy changes:

1. Check whether subscribers are using Apple Mail or Gmail;
2. Prioritise clicks instead of opens; and
3. Optimise calls-to-action to increase clicks.

He was happy to report a downward trend in unsubscribe rates between 2020 and 2022. 

The roadshow attendees engaged enthusiastically with the Everlytic team, raising questions, dissecting the data, and commenting on the trends they were finding in their own email campaigns. 

Click here to download the full Email Marketing Benchmarks Report. 

This article was sponsored by Everlytic.