Email marketing continues to provide strong results

Despite being one of the oldest online promotion strategies, email marketing continues to be one of the most effective, a new report from the Direct Marketing Association’s Email Experience Council indicates. Over the past year, open rates grew slightly while click-through rates remained unchanged.

One average, emails made it to their intended target nearly every time – fewer than 5 percent of total promotional messages bounced. Meanwhile, open rates were consistent during the second quarter of 2011, up from 22.1 percent in Q2 2010 to 22.2 percent this year. Open rates were down slightly during the same period, decreasing from 5.3 percent to 5.2 percent.

Email performance hasn’t changed much in the past two years. Dating back to 2009, email open rates have stayed the same, while clicks are down by less than 1 percent in total. The only area to show much change is bounce rates – in the third quarter of 2009, 93.5 percent of emails made it to recipients, compared to 95.7 percent that reached subscribers this year.

This indicates that businesses are doing a better job of earning their customers’ trust. If companies aren’t transparent with their email marketing practices, consumers are likely to give them fake email addresses. However, because delivery has improved over the past two years, this suggests consumers know what they are signing up for beforehand.

Businesses are also sending out greater volumes of email – the number of messages delivered to subscribers grew 16.2 percent quarter-over-quarter. Meanwhile, revenue generated per email was also up 17.3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2011, indicating that email marketing is becoming more profitable for businesses as well.

A sector-by-sector analysis

Of course, email marketing campaigns will perform differently depending on the products they are trying to sell. Some industries will have more success than others promoting their goods and services through email, depending on the type of audience to which they are selling. For example, people are more likely to open an emailed bill or invoice than they are a promotion.

The retail sector in general had the best delivery rates, with apparel topping the charts at 99 percent. This shouldn’t be surprising, as most people sign up voluntarily to be on a retailers email lists, whereas a bank or a service provider that requires consumers to sign up may get a larger number of fake addresses.

However, financial service providers had the highest open rates. Traditionally, messages such as monthly statements or bills have had the highest open rate, as people want to check their accounts and make payments if need be. Many financial service providers take advantage of this to promote new products or services.

Meanwhile, the consumer telecom service sector garnered the highest click-through rate (9 percent), followed by consumer products CPG (8 percent) and financial services (6.5 percent).

Overall, consumer products CPG had the most favorable click to open rate, as 17 percent of consumers opened emails from these companies and nearly half clicked links in these messages. This suggests companies in this sector will have the greatest amount of success with email marketing efforts.

Do you currently run email marketing initiatives? Have you observed favorable results over the past year? Do your measurement standards fall in line with the DMA’s?

This entry was posted in Advanced, Email Marketing. Bookmark the permalink.