This year, Litmus was a few days ahead of POTUS for the presentation of its State of the union Email Report. Like every year now, Litmus presents its review of the past year in a long (56 pages anyway) document. On the menu, the market shares of email clients, emerging platforms, remarkable updates, security and privacy and the challenges you should expect in 2019.
Obviously, this document is a "Litmus" vision, i.e. focused on the message and its display conditions. But more and more, Litmus is trying to look at the production processes of email marketing, which widens the prism of this report a bit.
Here are some of the things we thought were interesting to extract from this report!
Most important: Email customer market share, 2017 vs. 2018!
The first observation is that the leading trio does not move much. We can nevertheless note that the iPhone and Gmail (and therefore Android to some extent through Gmail) continue to strengthen their positions.
Then, Outlook is back to its best! Microsoft is making a lot of efforts for professionals with its Office365 platform, it seems that it pays off.
Another striking rise, Yahoo! which tripled its score. A rise probably due to the merger of infrastructures with AOL (both webmails are owned by Oath).
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These figures are obviously global Litmus figures, and do not reflect anything other than Litmus customer data. They are nevertheless interesting trends to follow as we do not have similar figures for France.
As for the distribution of the types of environments, according to Litmus, the majority of email openings are still done on mobile, with a slight drop of 4 points over one year. The decline of mobile is mainly to the benefit of email openings on webmail. But beware, there is in webmails a significant share of mobile openings. This is the case of Gmail, and since this year of Yahoo! in fact, these two players put the images in cache before displaying them to recipients. This practice confuses the tracking systems, which are no longer able to accurately determine the display environment.
New email customers
A few major new features have been introduced in the new email clients:
- Outlook 2019 No major surprises with this new version (which is already not bad), but some improvements, namely, improved accessibility (text-to-speech), support for SVG format, Times New Roman is no longer the default font and replacement fonts in css now work properly.
- New iPhones : New screen resolutions that require some changes in breakpoints, HTML5 video support... still with a micro-bug (that requires a micro-hack).
- Apple Mail on MacOS Mojave Apple Mail is now equipped with a "night mode" (or dark mode) that changes the colors of your emails when activated. You have to test it to see the impact.
- Gmail Go New light version of Gmail for emerging markets, RAS level of integration for the moment.
- Amazon Alexa Since December, Alexa can read your emails, with some limitations, but an increased importance of semantics and accessibility principles (see theone of Thomas' latest articles on the subject)
Email client updates in 2018
- Gmail Updates :
- Support for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page Project), allowing great interactivity, but difficult to implement (routers have work to do to integrate this new possibility) and limited support for Gmail.
- New interface with suggestions for answers, suggestions for unsubscribing, changes in emojis, support for Roboto and Google Sans fonts...
- Major changes in the promo box with "smart" features, display of promo expiration, incentives, highlighted images, ...
- Update from Yahoo! :
- Caching of images, which has an impact on tracking (geoloc and number of openings for example)
- Promoting theunsubscribe list
- Outlook update :
- Added verified icons for senders
- Centralization of unsubscribes to newsletters
- Highlighting of offer details in promotional emails
- Outlook.com update :
- Beginning of media queries support
- Support for accessibility
Find the complete version of the report
Summaries are great, but the full version is even better! To download it, click here!
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