On the twelfth day of Listmas, my data showed to me overwhelmed recipients…
Just about everything on our list from the 12 Days of Listmas has one result: Recipients are overwhelmed. According to the Email Statistics Report,1 the “average” email address should anticipate receiving 72 pieces of email per day in 2017. Now, that doesn’t sound like much until you remember that many people have two email accounts (one for personal use and one for business).
Since both the number of accounts and the number of messages include business and personal accounts, the average user should expect to receive 144 emails per day. Many of those emails will be marketing emails. And, as it happens, send rates for marketing emails go up at the end of the year. So, that will skew those numbers a bit lower in January through October and higher in November and December.
In a telling 2015 Listrak blog post,2 Layla Thomas points out that there seems to be an inverse relationship between send rates and open rates in the last quarter of the year:
The blog post points out the most likely reason for this: As seasonal sending hits its high-water mark, the consumers the messages are aimed at have the least free time. The result: overwhelmed recipients. And overwhelmed recipients tend to be less forgiving of missteps in areas like overmailing or the repurposing of data.
And there you have it. We’ve had “12 days of Listmas.” I hope that these posts have been as fun and informative for you to read as they’ve been fun for me to write.
Y’all have a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Emails sent to dead folks,
Bringing back the old stuff,
9 inundated servers,
8 annual mailings,
“That’s our business model!”
“We’ve gotta make our numbers,”
5 SBLs,
4 authentication failures,
sending 3 times daily,
2 purchased lists,
and that’s why they’re having slow delivery.
Footnotes
- The Radicati Group, Inc., Email Statistics Report, 2017–2021 (Feb. 2017), https://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2017-2021-Executive-Summary.pdf ↩︎
- Layla Thomas, Presents You Open, Emails You Don’t: Open Rates & the Holidays (Aug. 4, 2015), Listrak, http://blog.listrak.com/2015/08/presents-you-open-emails-you-dont-open_4.html, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20171019203027/http://blog.listrak.com/2015/08/presents-you-open-emails-you-dont-open_4.html ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
