December 19, 2017 By
Emails Sent by Year
As you can see, our sent emails jumped enormously this year.
We’ve held pretty steady in the past, but 2017 knocked it out of the water (unfortunately, 2013 mails were sent through a legacy system and that total is lost forever).
This year we sent 181,177,569 emails, a 68% jump in emails compared to 2016.
There are two reasons for this.
- First, we put a lot of energy into improving our technology systems this year. And as a result, we were able to recover more than 100,000 email subscribers that had been lost due to system inefficiencies through the years.
- Second, in 2017, we committed to sending more targeted emails to our customers. We created a role at DigitalMarketer specifically focused on identifying high-value customer segments and crafting offers and messages that spoke to them. This allowed us to increase the overall number of emails sent – and our revenue from email – without changing our regular broadcast email strategy.
Best Open Rate of the Year
It wasn’t just our sent emails that increased the past five years. Our top open rate has buoyed upwards as well – very steadily.
The primary reason we’ve seen our best open rate climb ever upwards has been an ever-increasing focus on list hygiene.
While we’re always experimenting with new ways to boost open rates (and our amazing copywriters deserve a shout-out here), we have also invested more energy into reengaging subscribers and removing those who don’t want our emails any longer.
Compare the open rates for these two subject lines:
“Good news for people who love bad news…” (2013) – 9.6%
“I have good news and bad news…” (2017) – 15.7%
Yeah, sometimes we swipe from ourselves. 🙂
Of course, these aren’t exactly the same but the two subject lines contain similar elements. And while both made the top 10 best in their respective year, the open rate was 64% higher in 2017.
This goes to show that maintaining a clean email list is one of the highest-leveraged activities you can do. (Read more.)
Aneese Johnson 