E-Mail Marketing Open Rates Declining
Worldwide e-mail marketing open rates sagged to 12.52 percent in the second half of 2008, according to a recent report released by MailerMailer.
This marks a decline from 13.20 percent in the first half of 2008 and 13.98 percent in the second half of 2007.
The “Email Marketing Metrics Report” examined open rates for different industries and list sizes and found that smaller lists had higher open and click-through rates than larger lists.
For e-mail lists between 25 to 499, banking/finance saw the highest open rates at 33.53 percent, followed by religious/spiritual with 33.31 percent and nonprofit/trade association with 32.99 percent.
For e-mail lists between 500 to 999, banking/finance had the highest open rates at 41.33 percent, followed by religious/spiritual with 35.45 percent and telecommunications with 30.78 percent.
For larger e-mail lists with 1,000 and more e-mail addresses, religious/spiritual saw the highest open rates at 25.21 percent, followed by telecommunications with 22.64 percent and transportation/travel with 20.74 percent.
In terms of click rates, for e-mail lists between 25-499, transportation/travel saw the highest with 24.02 percent, followed by banking/finance with 10.62 percent and manufacturing with 9.52 percent.
For e-mail lists between 500 to 999, transportation/travel saw the highest click rates at 27.61 percent, followed by banking/finance with 11.78 percent and consulting with 11.65 percent.
For e-mail lists of 1,000 and more, religious/spiritual had the highest click rates at 6.80 percent, followed by transportation/travel with 4.19 percent and consumers – general with 4.17 percent.
The bi-annual report also listed the most popular words used in subject lines: news, party, newsletter, free, night, sale, .com, update, holiday and week.
E-mails with subject lines of less than 35 characters received open rates of 18.98 percent, while those with subject lines of more than 35 characters received open rates of 15.38 percent.
For click rates, the split was 3.52 percent to 1.75 percent.
Sources:</strong
http://imagehosting.mailermailer.com/email-marketing-metrics-2008h2.pdf
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007158
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/06/top-10-subject-line-words-that-get-opens
