The Q309 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks study revealed that email open rates increased from 19.8% in Q308 to 22.0% in Q309 while 12 of the 16 industries Epsilon tracks had an increase in open rates over Q308. Click rates were 6.2%, an increase of 5.1% from the same time last year (5.9%), the analysis found.
Emails from consumer products companies enjoyed the highest click rates in Q309 among industries measured.
Additional Q3 findings:
Kevin Mabley, SVP of strategic & analytic consulting at Epsilon, said "... timely, relevant offers that reflect customer preferences and behavior will drive the most opens, clicks and conversions... "
Additionally in the report, Epsilon quotes an earlier-this-year study from Return Path that, showed that 84% of permission-based emails sent in the U.S. and Canada during the first half of 2009 reached in-boxes.
For additional information from Epsilon, please visit here.
Email opening rates may be increasing but we should be worried that the absolute rates are very low. If four in five remain unopened we should spend more time finding out why so many remain unopened.
How solid are the estimates (or counts) of email open rates and click rates? I'm a little skeptical that these macro aggregates reflect reality, except when very high quality targeting has been applied to the recipient selection algorithms.
I am skeptical the email open rates are accurate. They need to be broken down between emails I opted in for and ones sent without me asking. I average maybe 3-8% open rate for ones I ask for and a 0.01% for ones sent to my spam folder.
Usually what I read in MediaPost about email open rates, click rates, etc. is about why *NOT* to follow or care about open rates, click rates, etc. because they become arbitrary and irrelevant when averaged, who wants to be average anyhow, and each of them can be conceived of very ambiguous calculations.
So, why this? I was happy to see the headline with my knee-jerk reaction, but as I thought about it more, my skepticism grew, I see that it is not uncommon either.
You had me for a second, MediaPost...