Study: 6 best practices for email success

Almost everyone sends email; not everyone does it well.

In PoliteMail Software’s recently released 2018 Benchmark Data Report, which includes data analysis of 200 million internal email communications sent using the PoliteMail for Outlook platform, several key insights emerge:

Shorter email messages perform better in terms of readership and engagement.

Keeping email short yields better performance metrics across the board. In all key measures—including open rate, ignore rate, attention rate, read rate, engagement, click rate and effective rate—emails under two minutes in length, or roughly 400–500 words, yielded the best results.

Emails with a reading time of four minutes or less have 47 percent higher readership and 38 percent higher click rates than emails taking over four minutes to plod through. Email under two minutes have 24 percent higher readership and 51 percent higher click-through than email between two and four minutes.

The report also includes an analysis of the top 20 percent compared with the bottom 20 percent in terms of attention and engagement rates. Top performers send nearly 20 percent more messages of two minutes and under, and nearly 90 percent fewer running eight minutes or longer.