Patrick Sande January 21, 2021
With 2020 in the books, it's time to take a look at some of the email marketing stats we saw at SendView the past year. Looking at some of the common threads shared among email marketers is a great way to shape and guide email marketing strategies for 2021. With that, let's dive right in.
2020 Summary
Most Common Send Day
One of the metrics I'm always interested in is the most common send day. It's long been cited that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to send an email. While we don't have engagement metrics to verify that, we can certainly see that Thursday did reign as the most common day that email marketers sent emails in 2020.
COVID-19
Another metric that absolutely needs to mentioned, given it being 2020 and all, is the percentage of emails that mentioned COVID-19 or Coronavirus was 10.53% of all emails received by SendView in 2020. And, if we limit to just emails sent between March and December, that % jumps up to 12.06%. I do want to also call out that April was the peak month for COVID-19 mentions, with 19.72% of all emails containing the reference. Hopefully the days of "A letter from our CEO" are behind us!
Google Annotations
One final metric I want to make note of is the use of Google Email Annotations. 3% of all emails that came into SendView leveraged the feature. I find this fascinating because I think it's such a great tool and always surprised to see that adoption isn't higher.
Email Volume by Month
Next, let's take a peek at email volume by month. I recognize that this is a busy graph to look at but I do think it's worth looking at as it highlights how COVID-19 impacted email volume in 2020. The majority of the trend lines illustrate that email volume grew each month. It's common to see volume increase as the end of the month draws closer. However, I find it interesting to see that this wasn't the case in March and May, email volume actually dropped towards the end of each of these months, which makes great sense. You'll recall many email marketers hitting a hard pause on marketing emails during this time frame. After case counts started to come down, a successful bending of the COVID-19 case curve, email marketing started to resume in June and we saw more traditional send behaviors.
Top Sending Domains of 2020
Finally, a peak at email volume at what Email Service Providers. For this, we look at all received emails and group by ESP. It wasn't surprising to see Salesforce.com at the top of the list. Klaviyo and MailChimp were close for 2nd and 3rd, and SendGrid wasn't too far behind to round out the efforts. Any surprises in here for you?
Thanks for reading my 2020 Email Round-up!