General marketing e-mail response rates have dropped from 1.3% to 1% between the first half of 2002 and the second half of 2003, while sales promotion e-mails have seen their response rates plummet from 1.6% to 0.7%, according to two-year study from Harte-Hanks.
During the same period, responses to seminar invitations have fallen from 1% to 0.4%, while Webinar invitations have dropped from 1.1% to 0.3%. Targets receiving marketing research e-mails used to click through them at a 4.7% rate: That has fallen to 2.1%.
The study attributed the lower response rates to three factors: E-mail volume nearly doubled between 2002 and 2003, creating more mailbox clutter; e-mail is being used more as a sales tool, with “click-and-buy” replacing value marketing efforts; and, as the report states, “Much of the increased, sales-driven volume is just plain bad.”
Harte-Hanks offers two rules for standing out in a crowd. First, marketers should remember the benefits of e-mail marketing: It allows greater targeting across a wider cross-section of the client/prospect base; tight Web/e-mail integration allows highly targeted, easily accessible messages to be delivered to different audiences; its lower cost enables increased targeted and repeated messaging; and the medium offered unprecedented tracking capabilities.
Second, marketers’ efforts will be much more effective if e-mail campaigns are part of larger, integrated programs. As Harte-Hanks puts it, “Don’t e-mail in a vacuum.”
Would that e-mail messages were going into a vacuum! But in interviews with business and technology managers, 41% said they received more than 50 e-mail messages a day – and that’s just at their work addresses. Furthermore, 31% said that one-third or more of all those e-mail messages received at work were unsolicited.
As it happens, one in five of the business/technology managers surveyed said they read unsolicited e-mail and occasionally click through to respond. Thirty-one percent delete the message after reading it, 43% delete it without opening it, and 7% request to be removed from the list.
Those surveyed aren’t shy about opting into e-mail lists, either. Nearly three-quarters have signed up for at least one such list within the last 24 months, with around two thirds doing so at sties where they have made business or personal purchases; 39% doing so at technology news sites; one-third doing so at sites with technology newsletters, or where they researched business purchases, or had business e-newsletters. Thirty-one percent enrolled in sites requiring an e-mail address for news services and 30% did so at sites requiring an e-mail address for a business or technical subscription.
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