Commentary

Email Opens & Clicks Climbing

by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, January 1, 2010

According to Epsilon, email open and click rates experienced year-over-year increases in Q309 vs. Q308 as the industry headed into the traditionally busy holiday season.

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:

The average volume per client increased 7.5% from Q308
The non-bounce rate dropped slightly from Q209 (93.5% compared with 94.1%), but was virtually unchanged from Q308 (93.6%)
Six of the 16 industries measured saw an increase in all three metrics - opens, clicks and non-bounce rate - compared with last year
The retail landscape improved greatly compared with Q308. Of the four retail subcategories, 11 of the 12 metrics increased compared with Q3 of last year
Emails from financial services companies continued to enjoy the highest open rates among industries measured

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.

click-through, email, research

4 comments about "Email Opens & Clicks Climbing".

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John Billett from ID Comms, January 1, 2010 at 1:51 p.m.
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.
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Rich Reader from WOMbuzz, January 3, 2010 at 2:28 a.m.

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.

Howie Goldfarb from Blue Star Strategic Marketing, January 4, 2010 at 11:50 a.m.

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.

Tiffany Lyman Otten from Tiffany Otten Consulting, LLC, January 5, 2010 at 5:21 p.m.

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...