In its latest edition of the “State of Email Engagement” study, Litmus has once again evaluated the state of engagement of email recipients. For this, they analysed more than 10 billion emails from anonymous recipients in the period from 1 January to 30 September 2020.

One of the core findings is that 60 percent of marketers say that personalisation has been a top priority for them this year. This means that personalisation of communication is still one of the most important topics in marketing.

Opening hours were also analysed by Lithmus. It shows that although most emails are read between 8 and 10 a.m., openings are otherwise relatively stable throughout the day.

Reaching the recipients at the right moment is definitely important. While more than 20 percent of emails are opened in the first hour after delivery, the chance of an opening 24 hours after sending is only one percent.

But be careful. Just because emails as a whole are most likely to be opened at a certain time does not mean that this also applies to their recipient group. So it pays to take a closer look.

Modern marketing automation solutions such as artegic ELAINE can analyse the opening behaviour of users precisely, optimise the sending time and deliver the emails to each user exactly when an opening is most likely.

Once the emails are sent, they most often end up in the email clients of Apple and Google. iPhone Mail and Gmail clearly dominate the market here with just over 33 and 32 percent market share respectively.

In addition, mobile opening is still the most popular way to open emails. This method is thus more popular than opening on the desktop (19.3%) or via webmail (39.3%). Although mobile opens dropped from 42 percent to 39 percent this year, with the share dropping especially in the months between April and June, this can probably be attributed to the COVID-19 parndemic and people staying at home. Whether this is a sustainable development cannot be said at this stage and remains to be seen.

In addition, reading time represents an interesting fact. Although reading time has dropped by 12 percent to an average of 12.2 seconds compared to two years ago, there is good news for you if your mails are read primarily on mobile devices. Here, the average reading time of emails increased by 1.33 seconds to 12.56 seconds.

The key findings in a comprehensive infographic