Social networks are the heaviest users of email, and enjoy some of the best user engagement via the channel compared to other platforms and companies.
A study by email provider Mailjet found that in the UK social networks and online community companies send out an average of 303,111 emails a year, while users from the IT services and consultancy industry fire out just 537 throughout the same period.
While this shows social networks might understand the value of email as a route to strengthening relationships with users more than most, the nature of communications imply it may not be a strategy other industries can expect to model on.
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As any user of Twitter or Facebook will know, emails sent by social networks are aimed at encouraging users to interact more with each other, employing clever prompt messages with the aim of driving users back to the site.
Mailjet found that ‘established senders’ in this space enjoy an average click-through rate of 20%, potentially on buttons designed to take people back to the network.
“Social media platforms tend to capture great user behaviour data which then can feed their email marketing efforts and drive traffic back to their website, with users ready to take action,” says Amir Jirbandey, inbound marketing lead at Mailjet.
The full industry comparison can be viewed in the table below, which shows that while the retail and e-commerce industry sends out the greatest volume of emails per year on average, relying on the channel for transactional-based emails, each user sends nowhere near the quantity of social networks.
