Patrick Sande April 14, 2020
These past few weeks, which feel like years, have been difficult for everyone. Before I dive into email stats, I hope this finds you doing okay. We know there are a lot of people out there who have been directly impacted by the pandemic and our thoughts go out to everyone.
COVID-19 has had a big impact on email marketing. For some, it's been business as usual but for many others, it's completely upended, basically, everything. In this month's summary, we're going to focus in on COVID-19 and some of the trends we're seeing.
Email Stats Summary
In March, Gregg added a new feature to SendView that allowed users to track mentions of COVID-19. For this month's summary report, I pulled that into the report. Mentions of Coronavirus were found in 17.02% of all emails received in March. I would suspect that March will be the peak month for mentions of the virus, but only time will tell. We'll continue to update this metric throughout the 2020 calendar year.
There are a couple other metrics that caught my eye for March.
LITMUS: With the addition of Litmus tracking added to SendView last month, I wanted to quickly touch on usage for the month of March. Litmus usage bumped up to 1.5% of all emails, which is great to see. Again, we're big fans of Litmus, so it's awesome to see email marketers out there using this tool.
AVERAGE LINKS AND WORDS: We've all been receiving the COVID-19 update emails, in fact, I think I could recite them in my sleep at this point. But, essentially, text heavy emails with few links and minimal imagery. In looking at Avg. Links and Avg. Words, we see a drop in counts from February, likely tied to these update emails going out. As we continue to move forward, I'd guess we'll see these counts start to climb again in a month or two.
Email Volume by Month
Email Volume over time is the metric I've been most interested in watching over the course of the pandemic. My personal feeling is that an increase in total monthly email volume will be a bellwether for when we may be starting to round the bend. I know a lot of marketers are out there asking when they should resume with selling, growth in monthly email volume will a sign that consumers and businesses are starting to re-engage with brands.
I'm going to leave it at that this month. I'd really love to hear what you're thinking about as an email marketer and how these overall trends compare or contrast to what you're doing. Stay healthy out there!