First-Quarter Open Rates Rise: Study

Those who are writing off e-mail as a dying marketing channel, take heed: Open rates for the first quarter of 2010 were up 1.1% from the previous first quarter, according to a study by Epsilon and the Email Experience Council.

The more than 6 billion e-mails Epsilon sent from roughly 160 client companies during the first quarter of the year had an average open rate of 22.4%. That’s an increase from 22.1% for the first quarter of 2009 and from 22.0% for the fourth quarter of 2009. The click rate for the first quarter of 2010 was 6.0%, down slightly from 6.1% a year prior, but up slightly from 5.9% for the fourth quarter of 2009. (All statistics and the chart below are from the Q1 2010 Email Trends and Benchmarks study.)

The majority of the e-mails tracked, 60.9%, were marketing messages. These had an open rate of 17.86% and a click rate of 3.7%. In contrast, service messages, which accounted for 7.7% of total first-quarter volume, had an open rate of 41.13% and a click rate of 6.8%—an additional argument, in case you needed it, for adding marketing messages to your service e-mails (see “Make the Most of Your Transactional E-mails”).

Broken out by industry sector, e-mails from credit-card providers and banks had the highest open rate, at 34.9%, followed by general financial services e-mails (31.9%), e-mails from telecoms (26.4%), messages from pharmaceutical companies (24.2%), and travel-related messages (23.4%). E-mails from consumer publishing/media providers had the lowest open rate, at 16.6%, followed by general consumer services (17.0%), apparel retailers (17.2%), business publishing/media providers (18.7%), and specialty retailers (19.4%).

In terms of click rates, consumer packaged goods companies enjoyed the highest rate, at 14.0%, on a 21.9% open rate. General financial services providers were a distant second, with a 7.0% click rate, followed by consumer publisher/media providers (6.9%), pharmaceutical companies (6.4%), and general retailers (5.9%).

The high click rate of the consumer publishing companies helped them overcome their relatively low open rate, so that the sector ended up with the second highest click-to-open rate (CTOR), at 41.9%. The ratio of unique clicks as a percentage of unique opens rather than as a percentage of delivered e-mails, CTOR is considered by many marketers a key measure of how compelling an e-mail message is and how engaged recipients were with it. Only consumer packaged goods providers had a higher CTOR rate, at 63.7%. Messages from credit-card providers and banks, which had the highest open rate, had the lowest CTOR, at 10.3%.