• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, March 21, 2004

Email Campaigns Improve in All Vertical Markets At Year End

Bigfoot Interactive announced its vertical benchmark analysis for email communication campaigns launched during the fourth quarter of 2003, showing that relevant and timely offers drive customer interest and response.

"Long gone are the days of blasting email with irrelevant messages to everyone in your database. The results (of the study) validate the power of permission-based, contextually relevant email and the increasingly important role it plays in driving commerce, customer service and the overall relationship between marketers and their customers," said Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive. "Perceptions of the inbox are changing and if a message isn't relevant, it's going to be considered spam."

Nearly every vertical market saw delivery rates (emails successfully sent) increase or remain stable during the quarter. The Media and Financial Services vertical markets led the way with overall delivery rates of 92% and 90% respectively.

Quarter Over Quarter Performance Highlights Across Key Business Segments:

Retail: Unique click-through rates for promotional emails reached a high for the year of 8.6%, representing a 4.9% increase in performance over last quarter's unique click through rate of 8.2%.

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG): A strong online holiday shopping season yielded a strong overall unique click-through rate of 12.4% for the quarter and a 22% increase in overall performance of CPG email campaigns.

Automotive: Unique click-through rates for editorial email campaigns reached 20.7%, an increase of 10.7% from the Q3 2003, driven by targeted, model specific email newsletters, with click-through rates as high as 27%.

Media: Unique click-through rates for media editorial campaigns increased from 10.3% to 13.1%, representing a performance gain of 27% after the summer slowdown. General and political news alerts generated consistently high click-through rates.

Financial Services: Overall unique click through rates remained strong overall at 10.2%, while delivery rates increased to a record high of 90%.

Find out more here.