New decade, new chance to track and smash your email marketing goals for 2020!

Where to begin? With this curated list of 9 email marketing statistics for 2020. Each one is tied to a strategy that can help you achieve just about any business goal. 

What’s your main objective this year? We have a stat for that – that is, we’ve tracked down research to help you form and clarify your plan for developing strategies and tactics that will help you achieve it. 

1. Advanced personalization generates $20 of added revenue for every $1 invested in it.

If this isn’t the statistic of the year for email marketers who need to make a case for tactical investments that show a clear return, we’ll eat our virtual hats. 

The data is from The Relevancy Group’s 2019 report, The Value of Personalization Optimization for Retailers, and is one of many eye-opening findings of the research.

If your list of 2020 marketing goals includes increasing revenue (and whose doesn’t?), get your own copy of the report or read our analysis of the findings on advanced personalization.

2. On average, marketers lose a full 34% of newly acquired subscribers within the first month.

It’s an old marketing maxim that your newest customers are your most engaged, but this stat shows that they grow cold quickly if you don’t nurture them. Not everybody is ready to buy all the time. But, you need to get them clicking quickly to keep their interest and show you offer them something valuable in exchange for their email addresses.

Try adding a live polling function to your welcome email and business-as-usual emails to get those pre-purchase clicks. This gives customers people a reason to engage even if they aren’t in the market to buy. And if you phrase your polling questions right, you can also collect important preference or attitude data that you can use to segment and target your customers even before you get behavior data.

3. Birthday emails can lift conversion rates by 60% over non-birthday emails with the same offer. 

Birthday messages aren’t just nice greetings to send your customers. They have a revenue payoff, too. If you already send birthday emails, add a dynamic feature to pique your customers’ attention, such as a scratch-off image revealing their special birthday deal.

4. BOPIS is big: 72% of Generation Z shoppers used Buy Online Pick Up In Store services within the last 30 days.

Who knew Gen Z could be the ones to save brick-and-mortar retail? While their parents and older siblings shop from the couch, consumers born in 1995/1996 like to visit the store – but not to poke around until they find what they want. 

This Package Concierge study found 58% of younger shoppers have used BOPIS at least once. The reasons vary, but many revolve around same-day gratification. They find what they want online, but they don’t want to wait or pay to have it shipped. 

Help your BOPIS shoppers of all ages find you by including personalized location information in each email, with a live map of the nearest location or the street address.

5. Consumers are interested in technologies that show whether a product is in stock (55%), help them compare prices or read reviews (49%), make it easier to find a product or its location (47%), or try an item before buying it (38%). 

All of those action capitalize on consumers’ interests in taking time and friction out of the buying process. 

Your email messages can take even more steps out of the process by adding dynamic content that uses real-time data to alert customers about low or sold-out inventory, to add your social feeds from review sources like BazaarVoice or show a map or store directions to bring them to your doorstep.

6. Emails using dynamic content based on real-time data generated an estimated $7 million of incremental revenue, or 17.4% more than purchase-based personalization.

Here’s another statistic from The Relevancy Group’s 2019 report, The Value of Personalization Optimization for Retailers, showing how personalization at the highest level beat out simple name personalization and even purchase-based personalization for revenue generation. 

Basic first-name personalization has pretty much lost its edge as a customer engagement device, and purchase-based data can be too limiting. You don’t need to scrap them because they do serve a purpose in showing your customers you know who they are and what their history is with your brand.

Rather, add a top layer of data-driven advanced personalization because it’s the most effective of the three methods and generates measurable revenue.

7. Adding videos to your email can boost open rates by 6%, increase click rates by 300% and reduce unsubscribes up 26%.

People love videos, as the stats show. Adding live video to email messages was thought to be too complex given the limitations imposed by different email clients and platforms, but a module like Liveclicker’s LiveVideo element can bypass those concerns.  

8. Both active and inactive subscribers order more often and spend more than nonsubscribers.

This study of email activity by the millions of subscribers who get emails from its platform because it showed that inactive subscribers aren’t always gone for good. 

The research found subscribers order at least 25% more often than non-subscribers, spend at least 6% more and are much more likely to shop again. Inactive subscribers are 26% more likely to make a follow-up purchase than non-subscribers, and their monetary value to the mailing list is about 32% of an active subscriber.

The findings support efforts to tune tuning up our acquisition efforts to attract new subscribers and to be judicious about handling inactives. Instead of just lopping them off your list, look for patterns that show website browsing and purchases even among subscribers whose records few or no email opens.

9. Even though 86% of consumers are concerned about data privacy, 72% of them will engage only with personalized marketing messages.

We’ve been hearing this mixed message for years, so it shouldn’t surprise you. But you can put this set of stats to work in your email messages in 2020 to build trust and serve up meaningful, not creepy, personalization.

Add links to a plain-language version of your privacy and data-management policies in every email. It’s not just a nice thing to do; it will help you comply with strict privacy and email requirements in laws such as the newly enacted California Consumer Privacy Act, which affects any marketer holding data, including email addresses, on California residents.

As you build trust, you can also add in the relevant personalization that dynamic content based on real-time data instead of potentially inappropriate or irrelevant numbers. Everybody wins in this scenario.