• by Ray Schultz , July 19, 2023

U.K. brands have witnessed an uptick in open rates in 2022 -- perhaps reflecting the impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which now marks emails as open as soon as they hit the inbox.

But click-to-open rates have declined, according to Email Benchmarking Report 2023, a report by the Data & Marketing Association (DMA UK) and Deployteq.

Specifically, email opens have jumped by 13%, for an average high of 31.8%, while click-to-open rates have fallen to 4.4%, compared to 11.7% in 2019.

Meanwhile, email delivery rates have fallen slightly — to 96.9%, down from 97.9% in 2021. But they rose to 98.9% in the retail sector, and 98.8% in finance, the latter recovering from years of low deliverability.

"While click-through-rates have remained stable year-on-year, and are down versus two years ago, this performance is relatively strong against the overall back drop of performance marketing effectiveness at the moment,” says Ian Gibbs, planning and insight director for the DMA.

Gibbs adds: “In the face of declining consumer demand during the cost-of-living crisis, performance marketers are finding that response is harder and harder to come by as reported in the DMA's CMO Measurement Toolkit earlier this year. A stable performance from email against this backdrop should give marketers confidence that the channel can help them drive results in tough times."

Deployteq partnered with the DMA and the DMA Email Council to collect direct supply-side performance data from 2022.