The Publicare email study 2013 for Germany
To which email provider Are marketing emails sent most frequently for end customers in Germany? How many Trash addresses Can you find on average in an email mailing list for end customers? And which federal state has the most patriotic email users? The 2013 Publicare email study brings it to light!
For this analysis, we evaluated more than 12 million anonymized email addresses. All these data sets come from real contact lists for B2C campaigns that were sent across Germany in 2013. When compiling the data sets, we made sure that they represent as representative a cross-section of broad end-user interests and target groups as possible.
Key findings
44 percent All e-mail accounts actively used by private individuals in Germany are located on a server of United Internet. The freemail services GMX and web.de from Montabauer' Internet giant are in a head-to-head race within the Group — with 21.8%, GMX is just ahead of web.de (20.4%). There are also smaller email services from group subsidiaries such as 1&1.
Die Deutsche Telekom With an email market share of 11.2%, their T-Online service is in 2nd place in the company ranking and 3rd place in the provider ranking. The fact that United Internet now serves four times as many active email recipients as T-Online is likely due in no small part to the fact that the Telekom subsidiary's freemail offering is simply too unknown. The gap between Deutsche Telekom and the next-placed direct competitor vodafone (8th place with 3.1%) shows Deutsche Telekom's continued industry dominance.
With Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook.com, etc. — 9.4%), Yahoo! (7.1%) and google (Gmail, Googlemail — 6.2%), the three largest international email service providers in Germany are only in 3rd — 5th places. This is astonishing given the massive efforts of the three US heavyweights to attract new users with sophisticated inbox management functions. Perhaps German email users have unknowingly anticipated the NSA scandal — in any case, they still prefer to send and receive their emails via companies based in Westerwald and Rhineland.
Entertaining insights beyond “hard facts”
Beyond the business-relevant “hard facts”, we have gained a few entertaining insights that we would like to share with you here. For example, did you know which federal state has the most patriotic email users? Or what can you learn about German consumers by evaluating fun domains? We figured it out!
I love Schwerte
The federal state with the most patriotic email users is clearly North Rhine-Westphalia. This is by far the most email users who use a city domain or their university domain. Based on the sheer frequency of domain occurrence, Cologne, Münster and Wolfsburg are ahead of the pack when it comes to city domains. In terms of population, however, the city of Schwerte in the Unna district is in 2nd place behind Wolfsburg.
Crying with happiness — or would you rather go organic?
One of around 1,200 contacts will choose a funny domain. This high rate is not only due to the creativity of email users, but also to the fact that GMX offers paying customers the opportunity to choose their own email address from a pool of fun domains — including domains such as vollbio.de or weinenvorglueck.de. What did we learn from these and similar fun domains?
It's only the image that counts!
Germans love self-expression! Almost 35% of all evaluated fun addresses chose a domain that served as a self-description. From partybombe.de and buerotiger.de to turboprinzessin.de to fettabernett.de: The vast majority of self-descriptions are positive — even though we've found a few “bad guys” in between, such as Polizeistenduzer.de or Liebt-Die-Frau-seines-chefs.de. What does netterchef.de have to say about this?
We love order
With around 12%, the second-largest group of fun addresses evaluated was accounted for by domains that correctly name the type of messages that should be exchanged via these addresses: office-dateien.de, coole-files.de or meine-fotos.info. We also found some users who wanted to receive promotional emails to an address on the domain nurfuerspam.de. Did they really mean their opt-in for email advertising?
Lifecycle emails in a different way
A full 11% of all contacts with fun addresses used domains that serve as status messages. The domain absend.de was used more frequently than its counterpart: bin-wieder-da.de. But kommespaeter.de, hab-verschlafen.de and terminverpennt.de are also represented in an unmistakable number. It seems that we in Germany are very honest when choosing our domains — but then not always as punctual as our reputation... baldmama.de appears significantly more often in our data than baldpapa.de, by the way. And when the offspring finally sees the light of day, there is only one thing for the proud parents. Exactly: Change your own email domain as soon as possible to — we-haben-nachwuchs.de.
The domain is the message
The medium is the message? Among our fun addresses, there were at least 6% of contacts for whom the domain plays this role. Whether habmalnefrage.de, liebt-dich.info, verlass-me-nicht.de, stay-bei-mir.de, lass-es-geschehen.de, fahr-zur-hoelle.org or ich-wars-doch.net: Email users say it by domain. You could fill entire daily soaps based on these keywords.
What else?
feelings? Hobbies? Fan messages? Biggest wish? Group name? Favourite fashion? Everything included. In this way, we were also able to gain the insight that muskelshirt.de has significantly more followers in 2013 than freinripptraeger.de, which gives us hope for fashion Germany. Particularly pleasing for us email marketers: domains such as ichwillwerbung.de. They make up for the disappointment with the nurfuerspam.de contacts a little bit.
