Email Engagement Report - Q4 2023

Every quarter, we compile email engagement stats from Omeda clients into one report so you can confidently evaluate your email strategy and plan next quarter’s new campaigns. This report analyzes data from more than 1.8 billion emails sent through our platform during Q4 2023, honing in on open, click and click-through rates. 

Coming up in this report:

• Overall email engagement 
• Performance by deployment type
• Best practices for getting conversions and revenue from your marketing emails
• A deep dive into the surveys and research category
• Tips on driving more first-party data and establishing your credibility through email

But before we get started: As a reminder, Google and Yahoo are set to begin enforcing their new anti-spam requirements for bulk senders in February 2024. If you’ve been following Omeda’s best practices on deliverability and safe sending, you’re very unlikely to impacted by the changes. But if you want to learn more about the changes, or you want to improve your sending reputation, check out our white paper for inside tips from our deliverability team.

Overall Comparison  

Formula Reference

Delivery Rate = Delivery / Sent
Total Open Rate = Total Opens / Delivered
Unique Open Rate = Unique Opens / Delivered
Total Click Rate = Total Clicks / Delivered
Unique Click Rate = Unique Clicks / Delivered
Total CTR = Total Clicks / Total Opens
Unique CTR = Unique Clicks / Unique Opens
Unsubscribe Rate = Unsubscribes / Delivered
Complaint Rate = Complaints / Delivered

For the last two quarters, email engagement has been remarkably stable, with the average unique click rate hovering around 1.33% and the average open rates around 32%. (In our last email engagement report, we thought that the number of people clicking summer newsletters and promotions counterbalanced disengagement from people who were on vacation.)

But in Q4, we saw a big spike in performance: The average unique click rate for Omeda customers rose by more than 6% last quarter, with the unique open rate rising by 2.35% and unique CTR rising by 3.36%.

However, this increase wasn’t spread evenly across deployment types. The average unique click rate for newsletters rose by 11% quarter over 11%, whereas unique click rates for events and promotions each dropped by about 10%. 

Notably, the surveys and research category also saw a 75% increase in unique click rate. While this category only makes up 1 percent of deployments sent through Omeda, such a monumental increase will have an outsize impact on the overall unique click rate. 

That leaves us with some questions: 

• What’s behind renewed interest in newsletters? 
• What the heck happened with surveys last quarter? 
• How can you use email to generate the first-party data you need to drive personalization and deliver the customized experiences your audience expects?

Read on for our analysis of all that and more: 

Performance By Deployment Type  

Events  

(Includes events, live conferences, virtual conferences and webinars)

• Unique open rate: 28.52% (+3.63%, up from 27.52% in Q3)
• Unique click rate: 0.62% (-10.14%, down from 25.45%)
• Unique CTR: 2.19% (-13.10%, down from 2.52%)

In Q3, event-related emails saw a huge increase in engagement: the unique click rate and CTR for this category rose by about 22 and 25%, respectively. 

But performance fell back to Earth in Q4: The average unique click rate and CTR fell by 10.14% and 13.10%.

We can attribute this to a few different factors: After such a notable increase in one quarter, we’d expect to see some regression to the mean (for the last six quarters, the click rate for event emails has been around 0.6%, give or take 0.05% in either direction). 

Some of it is also driven by seasonality: Lots of people won’t even consider traveling to a conference in a cold-weather city in January. So they’re more likely to skip a subject line titled “Join us in Chicago for the ACME Conference January 10” — and that’ll show in the category’s click rates.

Newsletters 

(Includes digital magazines and newsletters)    

• Unique open rate: 33.86% (+2.61%, up from 33%)
• Unique click rate: 2.05% (+11.41%, up from 1.54%)
• Unique CTR: 6.04% (+8.63%, up from 5.56%)

While newsletter performance stayed steady between Q2 and Q3, we saw a big increase in Q4, with the unique click rate and CTR increasing by 11.41% and 8.63%, respectively. 

So what’s happening? Some possible reasons include: 

• people have more time on their hands over the holidays to read newsletters
• improved targeting and personalization 
• improved sign-up and double opt-in processes

Promotions 

(Includes advertiser promotion, audience promotion, marketing, third party and white papers)  

• Unique open rate: 32.48% (+1.25%, up from 32.08%) 
• Unique click rate: 0.71% (-10.13%, down from 0.79%) 
• Unique CTR: 2.20% (-10.93%, down from 2.47%) 

For the last two years, clicks and click-throughs for promotional emails have dropped from Q3 to Q4. The pattern repeated in 2023, as the average unique click rate and CTR each dropped by about 10%. 

As implied, some of this comes from seasonal disinterest in promotional emails. But it’s worth considering what else might be driving this decrease – so you can keep your promotional strategy strong all year long.

So, we reviewed performance among each of our five promotional subcategories. An interesting trend emerged: While engagement for promotion-centric emails – like the marketing and advertiser promotion subcategories — dropped quarter over quarter, we actually saw more engagement with content-based emails like white papers.

We’ll get into all of that below: 

White paper subcategory

• Unique open rate: 33.47% (+1.86%, up from 32.86%) 
• Unique click rate: 0.55% (+27.91%, up from 0.43%) 
• Unique CTR: 1.65% (+26.92%, up from 1.30%)

White papers saw a big performance boost in Q4, with the average unique click rate rising by more than 25% quarter over quarter. 

While any increase in a small number will yield a higher percentage increase than it would for a larger number, this still indicates rising interest in well-researched, expert-based educational content (especially when combined with big increases in the survey and research category). 

Other promotional subcategories

• Unique open rate: 32.63% (+1.34%, up from 32.20%) 
• Unique click rate: 0.72% (-15.29%, down from 0.85%)
• Unique CTR: 2.21% (-18.15%, down from 2.70%)

This quarter, we saw the biggest decline among the most traditionally “promotional” subcategories — marketing, advertiser promotion and audience promotion. 

Third party subcategory 

• Unique open rate: 31.59% (+0.64%, up from 31.39%) 
• Unique click rate: 0.74% (+5.71%, up from 0.70%) 
• Unique CTR: 2.33% (+6.39%, up from 2.19%) 

The power of promotions: how to make the most of your marketing emails  

So what can we take away from this quarter’s trends? And how you can get more advertiser clicks, subscriptions and conversions through email? Start with some of these strategies: 

Consider diversifying your marketing mix. Combine standard promotional emails with content-driven emails like white papers, newsletters or other eBooks and webinar/event recaps. 

If your multi-email campaigns are lagging, you might swap out on email for some additional on-site personalizations and targeted display ads. (All of this is possible through Omeda’s marketing automation solution.) 

And if you see fewer clicks on your promotional emails, consider promoting your subscription via other formats as well, like exit-intent and standard modals, paywalls and targeted offers. (And if you’re an Omeda customer, use Omeda’s fatigue filter to temporarily pause sends to lapsed recipients.) 

Evaluate your conversion funnels and watch out for common drop off points. Some places to start: 

• Space out your outreach and preserve your deliverability with campaign management tools, like Omeda’s fatigue filter and campaign planning calendar.
• Also use Omeda’s Heat Map Report to see where and what your audience clicks most frequently and place CTAs in the most active areas.
• Use Omeda’s URL Click Report to see what content, landing pages and CTA messages drive the most conversions.
• When in doubt, streamline your email design.

This tells you what’s driving clicks and conversions — so you can spark and then sustain momentum over time. 

Combine demographic filters with behavior- and purchase-based filters so you can target niche audiences with more relevant offers. 

Incorporate dynamic content into your emails so each recipient sees articles, posts and offers that are matched to their previous engagement history. This way, you can realize the same results with less effort — and spend more time creating your next big campaign. 

Misc Comms  

(Includes any communications that don’t fit into the other deployment categories) 

• Unique open rate: 32.31% (-0.49%, down from 32.47%)
• Unique click rate: 0.88% (-2.22%, down from 0.9%)
• Unique CTR: 2.74% (-1.79%, down from 2.79%)

Surveys & Research  

(Includes reader service, research and surveys) 

• # of deployments: 14,661,104 (+23.03%) 
• Unique open rate: 29.20% (-0.31%, down from 29.29%) 
• Unique click rate: 1.20% (+76.47%, up from 0.68%) 
• Unique CTR: 4.11% (+77.92%, up from 2.31%) 

Our customers sent 23.03% more survey and research emails in Q4 than Q3, likely due to year-end feedback surveys and “year in review” research reports. 

Typically, you’d expect to see the category’s average performance drop as sending volume rises. But the opposite happened here: The unique click rate for survey and research emails rose by 76%.

Sounds far-fetched, but the math checks out: The gross number of deployments rose by 23%, but the gross number of clicks nearly doubled from about 89,000 to 176,000. 

This was driven primarily by the survey and reader service subcategories, which saw 156% and 37% quarterly increases in their unique click rate, respectively. 

Some of this comes down to methodology; Survey and research deployments make up less than one percent of all emails sent through Omeda. Not only do our customers send fewer survey and research deployments overall, but also a fewer number of customers send surveys, research-related and reader service emails. 

That means one customer’s segmentation and creative choices are more likely to have an outsized impact on category performance as a whole. (And we saw this among some of our customers.)  

For instance, two customers make up about 47% of all delivered deployments in the reader service sub-category. In the survey category, the two most prolific senders comprise 61.52% of all delivered deployments. (More than half of customers send only newsletters and/or promotions.) 

So compared to newsletters and promotions, this category is naturally more susceptible to big performance swings. 

But 76 percent is still 76 percent — and the outlier effect can’t explain all of that. So what happened? We think interest in surveys and research increased for a few important reasons:  

Improved targeting and segmentation. Personalizing your outreach and matching content to narrow audience segments will typically yield more engagement and improved metrics over time. 

Improvements in survey and research design powered by audience data: Survey performance often comes down to design – only your super fans will stick around to complete a 20-question survey. So it’s possible that customers were able to create shorter, more relevant, and more successful surveys after collecting additional audience data through Omeda’s forms, on-site personalizations, email and website analytics.

More individualized outreach: Some of our most successful customers sent very targeted surveys directly to specific readers or lists in their audience, which tended to perform 3x and 4x above average.

The “upcoming trends” trend. With every new year comes a natural sense of reflection — and prediction. After looking back on the last year, we try (and typically fail) to forecast what’s coming next. The content landscape reflects this: If you had an Internet connection in December, you probably saw a lot of “Report: Top X trends of 2024” in your inbox. 

Done well, these reports help professionals inform their strategies and lend context to their work ahead (that goes double in a politically significant election year). 

And even if they miss the mark, they inspire curiosity among people who suddenly have more time on their hands over the holiday. So it’s reasonable to think that people clicked – and engaged — with these reports more than they would for your standard evergreen report.  

The “wrapped” trend. Spotify’s year-in-review report — Spotify Wrapped — has enjoyed viral fame among its subscriber base for a few years now. But in 2023, the enthusiasm reached a fever pitch. For about two weeks, people shared their personalized reports on their stories — and seemingly every company rushed to create its own “{brand} wrapped” report.

Sure, the Spotify Wrapped effect can’t fully explain this large of a jump. But there’s no denying that year-end reviews are having a moment — and it’s possible this drove some incremental engagement for related emails in Q4 2023. 

Most likely, it’s a combination of factors. Let’s dive into each subcategory to see what’s happening: 

Survey subcategory 

• Unique click rate: 1.46% (+156.14%) 

We saw the biggest spike in the survey subcategory, which more than doubled its unique click rate between Q3 and Q4 2023. 

This was driven by dramatic overperformance among a few clients, who earned click rates between 2.6% and 16% in Q4. Because their emails comprised about 26% of all deployments in this category, this overperformance significantly increased the overall category average. 

Reader service subcategory

• Unique click rate: 2.04% (+36.91%) 

Two customers make up about 47% of all delivered deployments in the reader service subcategory. This quarter, both of those customers outperformed the subcategory’s average unique click rate of 2.04%. It’s easy to see how this alone drove up overall performance in this subcategory. 

Research subcategory 

• Unique click rate: 0.61% (+1.66%) 

Overall, research-related emails earned a 0.61% average unique click rate, a 1.66% increase from the previous quarter. (That’s especially impressive considering the number of deployments increased by 13.52% over the same time period.) 

However, there’s a lot of variation within the sub-category, with individual click rates ranging from slightly below the average to 4.25% and above.  

What sets top performers apart from the rest? 

For some, it came down to good segmentation: One customer earned a 4.6% click rate on a deployment sent to about 100 recipients, less than one percent of its overall list. 

Another earned around a 4.5% click rate across about 20 separate research-related emails. Among them was a research email delivered to only a few hundred recipients, a very small subset of its 100,000+ subscriber base. That email alone earned a click rate well over 25%.

We also saw above-average performance among multiple larger senders among our customers, which suggests consistently strong content and responsible sending practices are also behind this success. 

Surveys and research: the foundation of an audience-first strategy 

Surveys: audience data straight from the source 

Surveys and research haven’t gotten much focus in these reports in the past — and seemingly for good reason: They make up about 1% of emails sent through Omeda. 

So why are we devoting so much real estate to a category that represents such a small slice of customer emails? 

Because first-party data – like website analytics, email metrics, and form submissions — is necessary, but not sufficient, for creating a strong content strategy. 

You still need to draw the right conclusions from the data if you want to turn your insights into engagement and subscriptions. And that’s not always a given. 

Surveys help you bridge that gap. Designed correctly, surveys are one of the few ways to get first-hand feedback about your content strategy and subscriber experience. 

Surveys let your audience tell you what they think in their own words. They can confirm trends you’re seeing in your first-party data. Even more importantly, they can warn you that you’re missing something long before it impacts traffic and revenue. 

So successful surveys are a huge value add for your overall editorial and revenue strategy: Improve your click rate by half a percent and you’ve got hundreds or thousands more data points, all of which you can use to refine your content mix, personalize your offers and retain more subscribers. 

That reduces your reliance on guesswork and helps you replicate the strategies that work — a must-have in the “more is less” era. 

Research: translating insights into trust and engagement

More than any other content channel, research establishes your credibility. In a world where anyone can claim to be an expert, research helps you back up your talk — and build trust among your audience.  

Original research is a big lift (trust the writer of this report on that one), but it pays dividends in the form of increased engagement and loyalty down the road. 

So it’s worth considering what drives engagement in these two sub-categories. What are our most successful customers doing to get responses? What kind of segmentation, targeting and personalization are they using to maximize engagement? And how can you apply their success to your own strategy? Here’s where to start:  

Define clear objectives: This will help you segment your audience and better prioritize questions.

Tell your audience what’s in it for them: A lot of people see surveys as time sucks, even if they’ll benefit from completing it. 

To maximize responses, tell your audience how you’ll use their responses to improve their experience. Will you use their responses to put together an exclusive industry report that’ll help them improve in their jobs? Are you using answers to optimize your user experience or improve site performance? To tighten up your payment funnel or re-evaluate pricing? Tell them so!

From there, provide the estimated completion time and the number of questions. Once they know they won’t be stuck answering 40 questions, your audience will be more likely to open, click and complete at least part of the survey.

Send a reminder email after about 4-5 days. This gives your audience enough time to see and engage with your first email, but ensures you can still receive and process the data quickly enough for your findings to stay relevant.

Consider administering shorter surveys corresponding to specific parts of your audience experience, like immediately after someone interacts with your support team or receives their first article. This way, you can get more granular insights about specific parts of your subscriber experience — and your surveys stay relevant for everyone in your audience.

Segment strategically: If you’ve been with us for a while, that goes without saying. But how can you segment your audience to get more responses for surveys and research, specifically?

For surveys: Your segmentation strategy depends on the type of information you need to elicit. For user experience surveys, consider segmenting your audience by engagement level, then distributing to your most engaged users. Send satisfaction surveys to a random sample of users with a minimum level of engagement to get the most representative results.

If you’re administering surveys for a research project, segment your audience by job title or industry, then create further interest-based sub-segments within that group for even more specificity. (Note: If you’re an Omeda user, you can also advertise your survey via a personalization to anyone browsing related pages on your website.)

For research: For best results, combine behavioral filters with demographic and purchase-based filters to create a custom audience. (Omeda makes this simple: You can query your audience along all these factors in Audience Builder, build a custom segment, then make it available to your email team within Omeda right away.)

Some good factors to take into account include: 

• Previous downloads of related research reports 
• A specific number of visits to related web pages 
• The overall number of combined website and email engagements in the previous 30 days
• Recency, intensity and momentum of overall engagement (On Omeda, this is calculated using each person’s interactions across website and email)

Double down on dynamic content. Do you have multiple research reports to share? To personalize within audience segments, use dynamic content in your emails to ensure that every recipient gets the report that’s personalized to their specific engagement and browsing history. This way, you can individualize your outreach to each audience member — without needing to create distinct campaigns for each. 

Key Takeaways 

We just threw a lot of numbers and percentages at you. But data is worthless unless you can act on it. So what can you take away from this quarter’s report? And how can you use these findings to connect with and convert your audience in Q2? Here’s what we think:  

• Overall engagement picked up in Q4, largely due to increases in the newsletter, surveys and research and white paper categories. Whether this indicates a long-time commitment in content-driven initiatives remains to be seen. But investing in quality content is never a bad idea.
• Newsletters saw more clicks in Q1, but our research shows that newsletter performance tends to drop in Q2. Avoid the lull by incorporating dynamic content into your newsletters, creating more niched newsletters for smaller segments of your audience, and experimenting with your send dates and frequencies. (For maximum flexibility, consider allowing your audience to choose their own frequency on your preference pages.)
• Engagement with promotional emails dropped in Q4, but this is in keeping with seasonal trends that have taken place over the last few years. Expect to see the click rate rise in Q2, but take the New Year as an opportunity to evaluate your email marketing strategy as a whole, using the tips provided in this report. (Not sure where to start? Check out our research on the best send dates and times.)
• Surveys and research had a moment in Q4, due to a combination of outlier effects and increased interest in empirical research. Maximize responses for survey emails and collect more first-party data through more detailed and precise segmentation, improved campaign architecture and dynamic content. This way, you can learn more about a wider sample of your audience, use your learnings to drive better research-based content, then get even more engagement. It’s a virtuous cycle benefiting both you and your audience — and there’s no better time to start than now.