Welcome emails have best click-to-open and first purchase rates

Welcome emails and those triggered by inventory changes have the best click-to-open and first purchase conversion rates, according to a new study. 

Email campaigns triggered by price cut and back in stock notices resulted in first purchases from 25% of recipients, according to Bluecore’s 2022 Retail Benchmark Report. Abandoned cart notifications had a 23.9% success rate, with welcome emails succeeding 23.3%. The least successful (14.9%) were those aimed at people who searched for a specific or category/product and didn’t take further action. 

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The report is based on data from more than 35.5 billion campaigns across email and site from January 2021 through December 2021.

Abandoned cart and welcome emails also had the highest revenue per click for first purchase and conversion at $34.82 and $30.82 respectively. 

Click rate is especially important for email campaigns as it is the strongest indicator of customer engagement and possible purchase. It is also more closely tied to conversion and more reliable than Open Rate because of consumer privacy updates in iOS15.

The best click rates for first purchase and conversion are:

• Welcome 11.27%
• Back in stock  10.63%
• Price decrease 9.16%
• Abandoned cart 9%

Why we care: It’s hard to overstate the importance of welcome emails when it comes to quickly engaging people who haven’t bought from you before. Then can be as effective as abandoned cart emails – and those have the highest intent to purchase rate. Clearly, personalization around a shopper’s category preferences or predicting a next buy are key here. The report says not to include price decreases when personalizing, but the data is from last year — before inflation hit so hard.