The wonderful thing about email marketing is that a number of establishments and marketing companies fund and work on research which they are only too pleased to share with others. All we have to do is look for it. I’ve been not only reading specific results, but checking the conclusions with other research. While some of the stats confirm assumptions that most of us have, others are both surprising and useful.

Don’t worry; I have not become a numbers nerd. What I want to do is to present the result so you can test those which apply to your particular products. And to see whether a change or two might work for you.

I’ve discovered I am like 94% of people who search on Google. I’m not sure if that is reassuring. It’s logical. People do not search on Google to find adverts so much as to find what they were looking for. Just like me.

If you are paying for ads in support of email marketing campaigns, the next scary statistic is that four out of ten people, that’s out of the remaining 6%, click on the top three ads. There are multiple sources for these statistics. That’s not to say you should believe them as they might not apply to you.

I’m not suggesting you should abandon paid-for ads on Google and social media as a way of cutting costs. Only you can say whether it is economical to continue with them. It’s just something to consider.

Another statistic that will probably not surprise you is that more than half of those completing forms will supply incorrect information. Not good news for us in email marketing. There are ways to encourage people to put in enough information to give us leads, such as offering a gift that will be sent to their email address. Of more importance to us is the very high rates of abandoned forms. The feeling is always ‘so near, yet so far’. 

There’s an assumption that people who want to subscribe to our email marketing lists won’t mind completing a form with a number of fields. We seem surprised to discover they do. We’ve covered various ways of encouraging completion, from having fewer fields, to explaining why the information is important. As with all things email marketing, only believe it after testing. 

I’ll continue with statistics which support what we already believe. More than 9 out of 10 consumers don’t trust advertisements. Who is to blame there? We’ve mentioned before the efficacy of using reviews in adverts. This works especially well when your ads are targeted and those who are providing the reviews are demonstrably in their demographic.

One statistic that has remained constant for years is that email marketing is one of, or perhaps the, most cost efficient ways of selling. With our databases, and the precision of targeting this allows, we can write our own statistics. If we don’t like the results, we can test and then change.