Gmailers Most Active

Subscribers to Google’s popular Gmail service exhibit higher click and open rates and lower bounce rates than subscribers to Yahoo mail, Hotmail and AOL email, and thus appear to be more engaged with the email messages they receive, according to a study by Mail Chimp.

A recent analysis of the statistics for more 184 million emails sent from MailChimp’s email service segmented the message recipients by email provider (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Comcast). It revealed that emails sent to Gmail users had a 30.94% open rate (compared with 25.54% for mails sent to Yahoo.com domains, 20.09% sent to AOL.com domains and 23.79% sent to Hotmail.com domains).

The study also found that Gmail users exhibited a 7.41% click rate (compared with click rates less than 5% for the other services).

MailChimp noted that the number of emails it has sent overall to Gmail users (29 million) has surpassed the number sent to subscribers of AOL (28.75 million), even though AOL has been around for much longer. However, in terms of emails sent, Yahoo and Hotmail are still the more “mailed-to” domains.

Though Mail Chimp did not offer any definitive conclusions for why Gmail subscribers appear to be more engaged, MailChimp’s Ben Chestnut said in a blog post that it “could be some demographic kinda thing.”

In what may or may not be related to these findings, a recent report on email deliverability from Return Path revealed that Google’s Gmail service is the most difficult US-based ISP for permissioned marketers to reach, with 23% of emails that marketers sent to Gmail never reaching the inbox. This more intense filtering may be a factor in ensuring that that more relevant emails reach users who are interested in them, resulting in more clicks.