E-Mail is Alive, but Open Rates, Click Rates Decline

According to the latest “Email Marketing Metrics Report” from MailerMailer, its 10th version, e-mail is not dead. Though open and click rates have declined since last year, e-mail is showing that it’s an evolving beast that is actually finding ways to work well with social media networks – the very ones that were supposed to kill it off.

The study found that open rates declined to 11.2 percent in the second half of 2009, down from 12 percent in the first half of 2009, 12.5 percent in the second half of 2008, 13.2 percent in the first half of 2008, and 14 percent in the second half of 2007.

E-mail clients disabling the automatic loading of images has “substantially lowered the reported open rates within the industry,” according to MailerMailer. “For this reason the open rate is no longer considered an absolute measure of any given message’s success.”

The increased use of e-mail handheld devices and list fatigue are also contributing to the sinking open rates.

Nevertheless, there were sectors that saw high open rates, including Agriculture (25.3 percent), Religious (21.0 percent), Transportation (18.1 percent) and Large Business (17.3 percent). Sectors that especially struggled include Medical (7.3 percent), Marketing (7.4 percent), Banking (8.2 percent) and Entertainment (9.2 percent).

In general, MailerMailer found that smaller lists tend to earn higher open rates.

Hourly open rates peak about two hours after an e-mail is sent, and they decline precipitously from there.

“In general, you’ll get about 30% of the total opens you’re going to see after 2 hours, and roughly 50% of your total opens after 7 hours,” according to the company. “Once 23 hours have passed, you should have 75% of the total opens your email is going to receive. 90% of your opens will have occurred three days after the send.”

Click rates dropped off to 1.6 percent in the second half of 2009, down from 2.6 percent in the first half of 2009. Links that aren’t live (thanks to e-mail clients that make this happen in order to stop phishing attacks) and list fatigue were the two major contributing factors to this decline.

The sectors that saw the highest click rates include Religious (10.5 percent), Transportation (7.6 percent) and Environmental (4.8 percent). The sectors that saw the lowest click rates are Restaurant (0.7 percent), Entertainment (0.7 percent) and Marketing (0.8 percent).

The average click rate for messages with more than 20 links was 2.9 percent, followed by messages with between 1-5 links (2.4 percent), 11-20 links (1.9 percent) and 5-10 links (1.4 percent).

Open rates were highest on Sundays, while click rates peaked on Saturdays and Sundays during all of 2009.

MailerMailer also found that the more frequently you sent e-mail, the lower your bounce rates were in 2009.

Also, messages with just a personalized message got the highest open rates (12.6 percent), followed by messages that weren’t personalized (11.8 percent), messages with both the subject line and message personalized (6.9 percent) and messages with just the subject line personalized (6.7 percent). Click rates followed a similar pattern, with messages with just the subject line personalized getting the lowest rates.

The open rate for messages with subject lines of fewer than 35 characters was 17.6 percent, compared to 11.6 percent for messages with subject lines of more than 35 characters.

The click rate for messages with subject lines of fewer than 35 characters was 2.7 percent, compared to 1.6 percent for messages with subject lines of more than 35 characters.

Source:

http://www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/subject-lines.rwp