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Marketing

However, did this trend continue? Hubspot says Open Rates Fell
no. The marketing juggernaut released a report at
the end of October this year asserting that after ini- Initially, we look to open rates to gauge if custom-
tial explosions of emails and subsequent consumer ers are receptive to our messages. An open rate
mass consumption, the responses to emails, and is how many people, expressed as a percentage,
sales, are dwindling. opened an email and is largely a factor of three
things:

• The sending address or who the email is from.

• The subject line.

• The teaser text that appears in browsers to
provide a summary of the email.

However, environmental factors that contend for
With the outrageous context of 2020 in mind, we attention can trump all of these rules. The data
widened our scope for this year’s benchmarks and exposes that after an initial spike in March during
leaned into the data. We pulled statistics for the the initial COVID Shelter-In-Place orders, there
past year on 222 wineries with over 9,000 cam- has been a steady decline in Open Rates in 2020.
paigns and just shy of 46 million emails, and what Moreover, although this study ended on 9/30 - we
we found was interesting. can also assume we will experience lower rates in
November and December with the election and the
THE RESULTS standard holiday email burnout.

We all increased our email campaigns. The aver-
age number of campaigns sent per winery in our
2018-2019 report was 1.88 per month, equating
to a little less than 23 emails a year or a frequency
of one email every 2-3 weeks for sales, events, or
wine club communications.

The average number of campaigns sent per win-
ery in 2020 is double this at 3.63 per month, which
means that on average, we sent one email a week
to communicate with our customers this year. It
seems that we followed suit with other industries Bounce Rates Increased
who jumped on email as the logical replacement
for in-person customer care, sales, and support. Bounces fall into two classes. A soft bounce is
And why not? Email is relatively inexpensive, and it when the receiving server recognizes the email
does not require staff to be present in the office or recipient, but the address is blocked at the
consumers to be in a particular location either. It is, moment: such as an out of the office response. A
actually, the perfect COVID marketing platform. hard bounce means the address is no longer on the
However, did these emails work? server.

With office closures and unemployment hitting
the double digits mid-year, we can confidently
assume that many email addresses changed this
year.

This hypothesis played out in the data as we saw
bounce rates jump by 20% from pre-COVID to post-
COVID months.

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