There’s an inverse relation between the size of an e-mail list and the responsiveness of its audience, according to a new study from on-demand e-mail service provider ExactTarget.
According to the report, open and click-through rates for e-mail messages both decline steadily as list size increases. The study collected data from more than 4,000 organizations during 2005, including 230,000 e-mail campaigns and 2.7 billion individual messages.
ExactTarget found that e-mail campaigns sent to lists of 100 to 1,000 addresses achieved open rates of 42.1% and click-through rates of 6.8%. Those are higher results than those from campaigns of 10,000 to 100,000 addresses, which saw 25.8% opens and 4.5% click-throughs. Even larger campaigns using lists of more than 100,000 addresses only achieved 18.2% opens and 3.6% click-throughs.
“This phenomenon is one of the strongest cases for audience segmentation,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget director of strategic services in a statement. “The smaller the targeted audience, the better organizations can aim their message directly to their subscribers in their e-mail communications.”
The study also found that B-to-B organizations experienced higher open and click-through rates than their B-to-C counterparts: 37.8% opens and 5.2% click-throughs in B-to-B e-mail, compared to 29.5% opens and 4.4% click-throughs in B-to-C. The report hypothesizes that the improved rates are due to smaller average mailing lists in B-to-B e-mail campaigns. Fifty-two percent of B-to-B campaigns went out to lists of fewer than 1,000 subscribers, and only 5.6% went to lists of more than 10,000 subscribers. By contrast, 41% of B-to-C campaigns involved lists of more than 10,000 subscribers last year.
Stewart said that e-mail content and creative elements play a crucial role in promoting opens and click-through rates for large e-mail lists. “With larger lists, it is much more difficult to drive significantly higher open rates than normal,” he said. “This is due both to list fatigue inherent in larger lists and the reality that it is difficult to convey compelling and relevant messages to a large audience through the subject line.”
