Gmail users appear to be more engaged with the marketing e-mails they receive in their inboxes than their Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL counterparts, according to a recent look into stats by e-mail marketing service provider MailChimp.
A blog post written by Ben at MailChimp reveals that Gmail users had substantially higher open and click rates for marketing e-mails. Statistics for more than 184 e-mails sent from MailChimp to Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail and Hotmail inboxes were analyzed.
The open rate for Gmail accounts was 30.94 percent from April through August 2009, far ahead of Yahoo!, which was second highest with a 24.54 percent open rate during the same time period.
Hotmail accounts were third with a 23.79 percent open rate, while AOL accounts were fourth with a 20.09 percent open rate.
Click rates revealed a similar story, as Gmail led the way with a 7.41 percent rate, followed by Hotmail with 4.49 percent, AOL with 4.25 percent and Yahoo! with 4.17 percent.
Gmail accounts also had the second-lowest soft bounce rate and the lowest hard bounce rate.
Hotmail accounts received the most e-mail, with 63.5 million e-mails sent to that domain during the designated time period, followed by Yahoo! with 54.8 million, Gmail with 29.0 million and AOL with 28.8 million.
According to comScore, Yahoo! Mail was the biggest e-mail property among U.S. users in July with 106.2 million unique visitors, a 22 percent increase from the same month last year.
Windows Live Hotmail was second-largest with 47.1 million visitors, a 3 percent increase from July 2008, while Gmail was third with 37.0 million visitors, a 46 percent increase. AOL was fourth with 36.4 million visitors, a 19 percent decline.
Comcast, the fifth-largest e-mail property in July according to comScore, was left out of the MailChimp analysis. The domain received 8.7 million e-mails during the April to August timeframe. “Frankly, it was so out of line with the others, we’re going to look into that one in more detail,” Ben noted in the blog post.
While demographic differences between the e-mail providers is mentioned in the post as a possible factor for the noticeable differences in e-mail engagement, other possibilities probably include the different spam filters for each e-mail provider.
Comments on the blog post touched upon how Gmail inboxes are cleaner than other inboxes. User Jeff Lowe said, “In my experience Gmail does a far better job at detecting and correctly filtering spam than the other mail services (I have used nearly all of them).”
Older Hotmail and Yahoo! inboxes “are just junk mail boxes now piling up and never read,” said user Gurumustuk Singh.
User Nicole commented on the post by saying she uses her Gmail account “only for things I’m particularly interested in. I send everything else, and those I suspect might oversend, to my Yahoo account. I know others who also do this, so I suspect I’m not alone here. Thus, since I send only things I’m particularly interested in to Gmail, I open it, and thus appear more engaged.”
Sources:
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/gmail-users-more-engaged-than-yahoo-hotmail-aol/
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007262
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