In the Beginning – A Little History
1. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson on the ARPAnet, which was the progenitor of what was to become the Internet. At first, his email messaging system wasn’t thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to his colleague Jerry Burchfiel, he said “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”
2. The first spam email was sent on May 3, 1978. Gary Thuerk, a marketer for DEC, (Digital Equipment Corporation), sent out his message to 400 of the 2600 people on ARPAnet. Naturally, he was selling something. Computers, or more specifically, information about open houses where people could check out the computers. He annoyed a lot of people, as spam still does to this day. He also had some success, with a few recipients interested in what he was pushing. And thus, spam was born.
Current Day
3. 64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line.
4. More people are reading email on their phones than on the desktop.
5. 40% of surveyed individuals said they enjoy getting emails sent to them by their favorite brands.
6. The average person checks their smartphone 34 times a day.
7. 75% of North Americans read email on their phones everyday (that’s 112.8 million people).
8. Half of respondents to a 2013 email marketing census identified that the quality of their email database caused problems with their email campaigns, making it the most common barrier for three years running. This is the best reason there is to clean and validate your email list.
9. Emails that include social sharing buttons have a click-through rate 115% higher than those do not.
10. Email open rates are the highest they’ve been since 2007. Consumer product emails scored the highest open rates with a median 25.4 percent.
11. 17% of email marketers don’t track, report or analyze their email marketing metrics for their campaign deployments.
12. The highest CTRs (click through rates) were generated from education, healthcare, retail and consumer products/services.
13. 12% of people use separate work and personal email addresses.
14. 65% prefer emails that contain mostly images vs. 35% who prefer mostly text.
15. Saturday has the highest CTR at over 9% (Sunday is second just under 9%) for consumer email campaigns.
16. Average return on email marketing investment: $44.25 for every dollar spent.
17. Commercial emails account for 70% of spam complaints.
18. In a recent survey, 35% of respondents said they acted on an email promotion within the last week, and 33% said they did so in the last month.
19. Subject lines with 30 or fewer characters performed above average in opens and clicks.
20. 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line.
The Future
21. 78% Of U.S. email users will also access their emails via mobile by 2017.
22. By 2015, 44% of people in the US will be using a smartphones.
23. By 2015, 53 million people will own and use a tablet computer or eReader.
24. Email marketing spending will reach $2.5 Billion by 2016.
25. The total number of email accounts is expected to reach 5 Billion by 2017.