An interesting new report answers a question most email marketers would love to know: which specific email clients are recipients using to view their messages?
The report, issued this month by the creators of a new analysis tool called Fingerprint, examined data from nearly 3 million email subscribers to reveal the 10 most popular email clients used by recipients on business-to-business and business-to-consumer mailing lists.
To get the complete results, you can read the study here. But in the meantime, here are the top three email clients, according to the study:
- BtoB email clients. 36 percent of recipients opened their email in Outlook, with the vast majority using Outlook 2003 and earlier; 33 percent used Hotmail; and 14 percent used Yahoo! Mail.
- BtoC email clients. 29 percent of recipients opened their email in Yahoo! Mail; 27 percent used Outlook, with a nearly even split between Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 and earlier; and 25 percent used Hotmail.
The technology records the email client when images are loaded within an email. So email applications that block images by default, or are not capable of displaying HTML email, such as previous iterations of Blackberry, may be underrepresented. Another thing to keep in mind is that the practice of enabling or disabling images may vary by email client as well.
But there are still a couple of interesting takeaways here, not the least of which is, if you’re still not designing your messages to account for blocked images, you need to be, since both Outlook and Hotmail block images by default.
It’s also interesting to note that Hotmail appears to be giving Outlook a run for the money in the BtoB inbox. Apparantly, a lot of people are reluctant to share workplace details in order to subscribe to business mailings— something for BtoB marketers to think about.
