Consumer research: Email is effective

This post is part of a series called "A Quick Survey." 

As a marketer, you’re probably sending emails to a database of people on a pretty regular basis. Despite traction of click-through rates that can signal whether people are opening your emails, it might feel like the content within your efforts to promote your brand isn’t actually resonating with the people receiving them. Especially if you’re not seeing direct sales.

Rest assured, consumers told us they are in fact still interested in your emails. Even though it can seem old-school and inundated, it’s definitely effective.

We know this because we’re always interested in how consumers are engaging with brands. To discover more, we sent them a survey asking how they would best describe their engagement with brands via email, SMS/text, loyalty programs, mobile app, and social media within the past year.

Out of all channels, the two that saw the most increase in regards to brand engagement were email and SMS/text. 60% of respondents indicated an increase on both platforms this past year. About 35% of consumers said their engagement on email stayed consistent with the year before. Only around 5% of consumers indicated their engagement with brands on email decreased.

Even with these numbers, always take into consideration that too many emails can backfire on your efforts to promote your brand. It’s also the channel consumers found the most overwhelming – so be careful.

Putting it into numbers, 22% of respondents said they were always overwhelmed by emails, while all other channels came in at 15% or less. Another 24% said they were overwhelmed most of the time in comparison to the other channels coming in at under 18%.

When it came to sometimes feeling overwhelmed, 35% answered as such. Some consumers, around 13% who took the survey, signaled they were rarely overwhelmed, while the remaining 7% responded never feeling that way when receiving too many emails.

If you’re curious how many promotional emails to send – there’s probably no magic number. Just keep it relevant and ask yourself how you’d feel about what and how much ended up in your inbox.

So, happy sending! The emails you create will be keeping your brand top of mind, ensuring consumers will come to you when they are ready to make a purchase.