The OPTIZMO™ Blog

News and tips from the industry leaders in email compliance.

By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on OnlyInfluencers on 6/28/22

As we approach the halfway point of 2022, we’re now a bit over 2 years since Covid was declared a pandemic (March 11, 2020). At that point, it’s safe to say that marketers had little to no idea how dramatically our businesses and marketing programs would be impacted. Now, with 2 years of hindsight, we can see how marketing was disrupted in the short term and how some of those impacts are likely to have long-term ramifications for marketers in the years ahead.

Effectively every marketing channel was impacted, and email was certainly not left out. While many reports focus on positive email metrics covering email engagement or increasing email marketing budgets, it’s also instructive to look at negative marketing signals, such as opt-out requests, and how they were impacted over the past two years. 

Every spring, OPTIZMO publishes its annual Email opt-out Infographic, based on data from the previous year. Not surprisingly, the last two years have delivered some interesting results, when compared to prior years, before the pandemic. At the same time, it’s intriguing to note that some metrics didn’t change as much as one might expect. Let’s dive into four metrics from the latest infographic (along with some data from the prior year’s release).

What Day is it Again?

As someone who has worked from home for many years, my day-to-day routine wasn’t impacted as more and more companies shifted to a remote work environment. However, as a veteran of the remote work world, I was already familiar with many of the disruptive changes it would bring for so many people who had never experienced working from home continuously for months or even years. One of the most common is having days blur together more than ever before. Losing track of what day of the week it is on any given day is a pretty common issue for people who work from home for a long period of time. Especially when people were spending their free time at home as well, there probably wasn’t a whole lot of difference between a Tuesday and a Saturday in many ways.

Traditionally, email opt-out activity peaks on Monday and then trends slowly downward each day through Saturday, with a slight uptick on Sunday. Would this change with everyone working from home? As it happens, people’s opt-out activity tended to follow the same pattern throughout 2020 and 2021. However, the numbers do show a slow flattening of the overall activity curve, where the variation from one day to the next lessened slightly. Does this show that on some level, people were impacted by having days blur together? We’ll probably have a better idea after this year when we analyze the 2022 numbers and see if the daily variation spreads out a bit again with many people heading back to the office.

Read the rest at OnlyInfluencers.

Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.

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