A recent survey by cloud-based marketing email service SendGrid has found that while the average monthly email send rate by marketers has dropped this year compared to 2016, open rates have increased and click rates have remained the same. “The increase in engagement stats could be a result of sending fewer messages each month,” states the report, “causing recipients to be more interested in the messages they receive.”

SendGrid’s 2017 Global Email Benchmark Report found that the average email send rate fell to 8.1 per month this year, down from 9.8 in 2016. Meanwhile, open rates increased to 30.6% from 27.3% in 2016, while the click rate showed little year-over-year change, dropping slightly to 2.5% from 2.8% in 2016.

The study examined over 50 billion emails originating from 100,000 senders using SendGrid across 25 industries, with almost 2 billion unique recipient email addresses. In 2016, eight of the 25 sectors surveyed were desktop-dominant in terms of how their audiences received emails. This year, just two are desktop-dominant, indicating a significant rise in mobile email consumption.

The study broke down sending and click rate by different industries. For instance, the monthly send rate in the e-commerce industry fell from 18.3 in 2016 to 14 in 2017, while the open rate rose from 12.3% to 15%. For emails sent within the agency/consulting industry, the send rate fell from seven monthly emails in 2016 to three in 2017, while the open rate rose from 23% to 34%. The monthly number of emails sent within the marketing/advertising sector remained the same at five a week, while the open rate increased from 24% to 29%. “An increase in most engagement stats without a change in monthly send rate may be caused by better, more targeted content to recipients,” SendGrid reports.