What are the email trends that transformed the banking industry? Being an email service provider, we have a birds-eye view of email metrics from across all the industries.
What are the email trends that transformed the banking industry? Being an email service provider, we have a birds-eye view of email metrics from across all the industries.
So, we took on a challenge to study over 50 billion emails in 2020 and identify which metrics impacted email campaign performance, the most!
In this brief statistics summary for the banking sector, we have:
- The average delivery/open/click/bounce rates across the banking sector
- The average email subscriber churn for the banking industry
- Content that engages and subject lines that trigger opens
- How many emails on average land in spam?
And much more
So, let’s get started!
76.8% of users prefer email!
While a lot has changed in 2020 and marketers are lost in a sea of uncertainty, we had a single solution to find the right answers.
Ask customers what they like. And so we did.
We sent out a survey to 1000+ participants and asked them questions about their communication preferences.
One of the questions was “Is email the preferred channel to reach you, or do you have a better channel?”
A whopping 76.8% of the surveyed users consider email as their main channel to reach them.
To add to this, a majority of email users are on Gmail – 72%. And Gmail also offers the highest inbox placement at 95% on average.
Email marketing statistics for the banking sector
Moving on to the statistics. We will consider the banking sector in this post and share individual statistics for other sectors in the upcoming posts. If you’re looking for the complete report, you can download the email benchmark report here.
Highest deliverability of 97% compared to all other verticals
When we looked at all the industry sectors, the banking industry stood out as a clear winner in email deliverability. Banks on average have a 97% inbox placement rate.
This is positively correlated with the authentication protocols in place. As banks have to be extra careful with their use of email marketing to avoid spoofing and phishing. The financial institutions have their email authentication in place fostering legitimacy, trust, and security with mailbox providers. That has led to an increase in email deliverability as MSPs allow emails from trusted senders to inbox consistently.
The average open rates of 13.5%
As users often share their active email addresses with banks, the average engagement is on the higher side.
The overall average open rates across all industries are at 12% with click rates at 0.5%.
The banking sector, on the other hand, has an open rate of 13.5% with a lower click rate at 0.23%. The likely causes for this are less relevant content or more informational content that does not require users to click on any links.
Clicks and opens tell us how users are engaging with the emails and are an important factor to consider for email marketing metrics.
We noticed a drop in the engagement during the COVID as people stopped checking their promotional tab.
An average email bounce of 2.07%
While banks validate email addresses, they cannot verify all emails in their list due to regulatory policies. So, banks have a higher than average email bounce rate of 2.07%.
One of the major factors contributing to the deliverability of emails is the bounce rate. There are multiple ways to reduce the email bounce with a few tweaks. Here are a few of those:
- Include a sunset policy of 60 to 90 days where all emails that haven’t been active for a set period can be removed from the list.
- Use a verification and validation service.
- Remove fake, temporary and spam trap ids with list scrubbing.
We’ve documented further steps to reduce bounce in the Benchmark Report.
331 out of every 100,000 subscribers churn out
While considerably lower than average, in the banking industry, 331 out of every 100,000 subscribers churn out via unsubscribes or go completely dormant for a long time.
To prevent users from churning out, increasing content relevancy has shown significant improvements.
And the easiest way to know if the content is relevant to your users is by asking them about the same.
Also, when a user unsubscribes, present them with a feedback form to understand why they unsubscribed. You can keep the regular options like the “Content is not relevant” or “Emails are too frequent”. But take a step further look at the unsubscribe pattern of your users. This pattern can be reverse engineered to identify the source of the unsubscription. Besides, you can find what emails caused them to unsubscribe, if they received too many emails or if they were already on the brink of churning out.
Best and the worst days to send emails
For all the campaigns sent out by the banking industry, Saturday was the worst-performing day for sending emails and Friday was one of the best days for the same.
The average open rate for the best campaign that was sent out within the banking sector was 51.87%.
Friday is the best overall day to send out campaigns across industries. Friday triggers the end-of-week mood in people and tends to get higher engagement for all emails. Specifically for Entertainment and Ecommerce related emails.
The BFSI sector sees reduced open rates with subject-line personalization
Compared to most other industries, subject line personalization reduces the campaign performance for the BFSI sector. This could very well be due to the sheer number of emails that are sent out using customer names in the subject lines.
One of the best subject lines for the banking sector is “Maximize your returns from your savings” with an open rate of 51.87
Banks saw an 84% increase in clicks with videos
In the Banking sector, campaigns that used videos within emails observed an 84% increase in click-through rates! On the other hand, the use of Gifs reduced the click rate for Banks and Mutual funds.
Though not all email clients support embedded videos, most do. And the others are adopting the technology within their inboxes to enhance the experience.
We sent out 400,000 emails to understand the impact of different content:
- 100,000 were sent with embedded videos
- 100,000 without any video content
- 100,000 sent with gifs
- 100,000 without gifs
Of the emails sent with videos, 61.2% of users engaged with the video within the email. The same email sent without a video only generated 33.23% clicks.
For emails sent with gifs, 27.6% of users engaged with the email while the last emails sent without a gif gained more engagement at 33.94% clicks.
Predictive Engagement improved open rates for banks
While Predictive Engagement had mixed results, the banking sector was positively impacted by the use of this AI-powered analysis feature.
Predictive engagement identifies the best time to send out an email to individual users based on their historical behavior and activity. This is one of Netcore’s AI features that improve engagement and inboxing performance.
When emails were sent with and without the predictive engagement feature enabled, banks went from a 12.79% open rate to 15.15% open.
An overall increase of 25-30% in inboxing and 35-50% in open rates was clear across the industry spectrum within 6 months.
Predictive engagement helped with improving the deliverability of emails for banks because of the high initial high engagement achieved with the use of predictive engagement.
Key takeaways
- Banks have the highest deliverability at 97% across all the industries analyzed
- Gmail dominates global email volumes with a 72% share
- Netcore’s AI-powered email delivery uplifted inbox placement by 20-30% within 3 months (April to June 2020)
- The average open rate of 13.5% with a lower click rate of 0.23%.
- The best day to send emails is Friday and the worst day is Saturday
- Send Time Optimization increases email open rates by 2X
