Though email offers a direct and personal channel to connect with users, it has become increasingly over-saturated in recent years and, thus, less effective for marketing.
Data from the Mailchimp Web archive for ecommerce shows that the open rate for emails has dropped from 22.2 percent to 16.73 percent in the last four years. Clicks have also decreased from 2.9 percent to 2.3 percent. The unsubscribe rate has nearly doubled from 0.12 percent to 0.23 percent.
It is apparent that users are simply ignoring or unsubscribing from what they identify as spammy or irrelevant emails.
Emails are dead?
Not yet. And emails will continue to be an important marketing channel for a while from now. This is because nothing beats email in terms of overall reach and scalability, and marketers are missing out on enormous opportunities when their emails lie unread by customers.
But these “unreachable” users are not a lost cause.
By combining emails with newer marketing channels that offer high performance, novel techniques, better messaging and timing optimization, marketers can encourage user engagement and recapture their lost audience.
One of the most useful approaches to this are browser push notifications, which allows you to reach your Web site users even after they have dropped off your site.
Similar to mobile app push notifications, browser notifications are sent from your Web site directly to your subscribed user’s browser. This means that, even when a user has left your site, he or she can still receive notifications — on desktop or mobile.
When compared to email, browser push drives 60 percent of users to view content in their browser versus the 15 percent of users who will even open an email.
Read rest of the article at Mobile Commerce Daily
