The following stats, facts & best practices support the wisdom of integrating direct mail into email marketing campaigns for incredible outcomes.

Before you plan your marketing strategy for 2018, have a look at a list of email marketing statistics and facts handpicked and compiled by EmailMonks.

It's easy to send an email to subscribers, but not so simple to make sure it's delivered to their inboxes. This graphic (and game!) outlines the email deliverability best-practices for marketers.

• USING EMAIL ANALYTICS DATA TO SEND BETTER EMAIL
• USE DEVICE OPEN METRICS TO TARGET USERS OF SPECIFIC DEVICES ONLY
• DIRECTLY TARGET YOUR MOST ENGAGED SUBSCRIBERS
• TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE BY GEOLOCATION

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1. Respecting personal data will change your email marketing strategy
2. Mailable ‘Microsites’ are set to continue it’s winning spree.
3. Conversational tone is adopted for more personal interaction with audience
4. More businesses push for mobile-friendly design
5. Testing and deliverability need addressing further
6. Personalization and segmentation remain a high priority, sharing dynamic and engaging content"

When it comes to planning email marketing campaigns, marketers need to take into consideration various factors to ensure there is no rendering and deliverability issues. One key factor is the support from various email clients. With subscribers using diverse email clients and devices, it is necessary that each email designed should meet their specific guidelines and beat the rendering challenges.
Let us have a sneak peek into the major challenges and workarounds of the popular email clients widely used by email marketers and subscribers.

"Think of the connection between hashed emails and identity matching like this: hashed emails are the key that unlocks the door and identity matching are the steps taken once inside. Hashed emails feature a built-in code that is similar to a cookie on your browser. Through this code, hashed emails can collect subscriber emails and then encrypt the data into a hexadecimal string.

Hashed emails are essential to identity matching, which refers to the tracking of behavior across various mediums so you can deliver messages that are relevant to the audience.

While the benefits of hashed emails may be clear to marketers, some businesses may only have access to direct mail lists or social media pages. Good news: There are ways to match this information to hashed email addresses. Once you acquire these addresses, you can use them to fuel multi-channel marketing efforts and increase overall engagement."

"Image blocking is common, with some email clients disabling images by default and some subscribers turning off images to save mobile data or for other reasons. Because of that, email marketers need to use defensive design techniques to ensure that their message is conveyed when images are disabled.

Defensive design consists of three key tactics:

• Using HTML or live text as much as feasibly possible, instead of embedding all of your text into your images
• Adding ALT text to your images—or better yet, styled ALT text
• Using background colors on table cells

Let’s focus on that last tactic."

Make sure you're not on the sending end of email mistakes with this checklist of 10 things to avoid in email campaigns - from spelling mistakes to broken links, unclear calls to action, and more!

1. Keep it succinct
2. Proper punctuation is a must
3. Include the text that is present in the image
4. Don’t ‘COPY and PASTE’ image captions
5. Count on context
6. Quotes are not needed
7. Distinguish the decorative images
8. Test
9. Style it a little
10. Innovate

1. Offer Relevant and Personalized Content
2. Bowing down to Visual Hierarchy
3. Exclusivity with Interactive Elements
4. Designing an Actionable, Prominent CTA
5. Focusing on Font Styling and Colors
6. Adding a dash of Social Proof

When bad data creates a poor experience

What would be a legitimate reason to have more than one email platform?

• Cost: prices increased with the number of email contacts in your database. So to keep costs down, many would split their lists and join another ESP.
• Multiple mail streams: having different ESPs will give you different IP addresses. Now, this is important because if you send transaction emails on one IP address, and those emails are opened and interacted with, your reputation will remain high (not stuck in spam filters etc). However, if you bulk send your newsletter, and the engagement rate is much lower, the reputation would be low on that IP address (more likely to be stuck in spam filters).

Actually, your email account is probably the worst online account that can be hacked. Once someone gains access to your email account.

Some 20% of email messages (23% in the US) sent by marketers never make it to the intended inboxes. See what share end up in spam or disappear, and what industries do worse or better than average.

If you include a custom font at the top of your font stack, Outlook will ignore all of your fallback fonts and instead display Times New Roman. But fear not! As with most Outlook bugs, there are ways to get around this.

We covered this topic in 2015, and the blog was hugely popular. We offered one technique to help create working custom font stacks, but our readers had a lot of other ideas!

In this blog we’ll repeat our last technique, as well as a few of submitted by our readers. We tested all of these techniques to make sure that they work, but they may or may not work for you depending on how your email is coded and how your ESP modifies your code upon sending. Hopefully, at least one will do the job!

We share real-world examples of 8 preview text mistakes that are undermining customer experiences in the inbox, plus tips on how to avoid them.

The metric you may not have heard of is click to open rate (CTOR) which essentially measures the effectiveness of the content of your email. It is calculated by the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens.

Using our ongoing example 100 clicks / 180 opens (multiplied by 100 for a percent) = 55%. As with all other email metrics, this can fluctuate based on how awesome your content is. A good CTOR will vary between 20 – 30%.