E-mail Performance on Upswing, Says Report

E-mail performance is improving, according to a report by DoubleClick Inc.

Clickthrough rates increased to 8.5% in the third quarter of 2002, up from 7.5% in the second quarter.

Open rates remained consistent quarter over quarter–at 37.3%.

Bounce-back rates declined a bit from an all-time high of 13.6% in the second quarter to 13.3%.

The highest open rates are among business products and services at 47.4%. Travel is next at 42.5%, followed by consumer products at 41.9%.

But the business products and services category also had the highest bounce-back rates in the third quarter at 16.5%.

Consumer publishing had the highest clickthrough rates at 11.3%. Consumer products and services had 10% clickthroughs, followed by travel at 8.3% and business products and services at 7.8%. The retail and catalog and business publishing categories both had clickthrough rates of 6.9%.

Other findings show that HTML e-mails prove more effective than text, with HTML e-mails comprising 43.6% of all e-mails sent through DARTmail in the third quarter. Tuesday is the most popular mailing day. Almost 24% of e-mail is mailed on Tuesdays.

DoubleClick’s third-quarter e-mail Trends Report contains aggregate data from the New-York-based marketing company’s DARTmail e-mail delivery technology. The data is based on more than 2 billion permission-based e-mails from hundreds of clients. The trends are derived from data analyzed over the previous six quarters.