Email volume grows but open rates drop

by Daniel Farey-Jones, Brand Republic 10-Apr-07, 15:20

LONDON - The number of marketing emails sent during the third quarter of 2006 was more than 1bn, an increase of 37% year-on-year, but open rates for customer acquisition emails dropped by more than a quarter, according to the DMA.

The DMA's National Email Benchmarking Survey showed a "worrying" drop in the average unique open rate for acquisition campaigns from 25% in the third quarter of 2005 to 18% in the third quarter of 2006.

The same rate for retention campaigns fell slightly from 34% to 33%.

The survey also highlighted improving delivery rates. The fail rate -- the non-delivered emails divided by the number of emails sent -- for acquisition and retention campaigns fell from the second quarter of 2006 when it was 9% and 7% for acquisition and retention respectively to around 3% for both.

Richard Gibson, chair of the DMA Email Marketing Council's Benchmarking Hub, said: "With inbox delivery still proving to be one of the biggest challenges for ESPs, this is an area where they can demonstrate real business benefit.

"As more and more clients adopt some of the deliverability best practice standards such as sender ID, domain key registration and use of spam-checking tools, we should see deliverability rates hold, or maybe improved in the next few reports. The rewards will be significant for those who get it right."

Comments

CJ Brough - 11/04/2007

Cold data mostly leaves prospects just that, so no wonder response rates are falling. Interruption marketing is useful for branding but little else. Deriving an effective cost per new customer from a cold list is tough even with the biggest budgets and the largest brands. Now that customers have got used to giving their consent for contact, they're pushing the boundaries and expecting to command exactly when and in what format they want to be 'sold' to.

TONY ATTWOOD - 11/04/2007

What this survey doesn't cover of course is any sort of conversion to sale rate. To get to that you might try these numbers... 1000 emails sent out, leading to 180 emails opened. 1% of emails opened result in orders, meaning 1 or 2 orders - a response rate of 0.18% in fact. This contrasts with an actual sale rate that can be obtained through email opt-in lists which give the subscribers something that they are really after - for example information and news directly related to their level of interest. I've got personal experience of these through this list, and through lists for school heads and deputy heads, and people interested in education, where we do get sale rates of around 2%. This suggests that an email news service that carries adverts ought to be 10 times more expensive to buy into than general lists - but in fact they are not - our email news service to schools (the ones that have regularly got the 2% response rate) is actually cheaper than some of its rivals, and only 3 times as expensive as the most expensive list on the market. Tony Attwood Hamilton House Mailings plc