• by Gavin O'Malley , December 8, 2004

Promotional incentives can improve e-mail open rates and click-through rates, according to a report by Advertising.com released yesterday. The findings reveal that promotional incentives can more than double open rates, and improve click-through rates by up to 1,000 percent, and that the type of promotional incentive offered plays a significant role in an e-mail campaign's success.

Advertising.com, part of American Online since August, analyzed the e-mail marketing performance of four advertisers with different marketing approaches. Each marketer offered different promotional incentives, and varied mailing frequency.

For the first campaign, an advertiser sent out a biweekly e-newsletter that gave consumers no incentive to open it. This campaign had the lowest open and click-through rates of the four.

The second advertiser sent out a monthly e-newsletter with a downloadable coupon, resulting in a 40 percent lift in open rate and a 398 percent lift in click-through rate over the first.

A third campaign consisted of daily and weekly direct e-mails featuring additional sweepstakes entries and available products, and demonstrated an 86 percent increase in open rates and a 502 percent increase in click-through rates, compared with the first, no-incentive advertiser.

A fourth marketer sent a one-time direct e-mail featuring an instant-win game and a downloadable coupon, which produced the greatest lift in performance--delivering a 133 percent increase in open rate and a 1,143 percent increase in click-through rate over the no-incentive advertiser.

The study concluded that higher e-mail frequency did not increase overall campaign performance--the fourth marketer who sent a one-time mailing scored the highest open and click-through rates.

For the study, Advertising.com analyzed more than 6.2 million opt-in e-mail messages served via Advertising.com's ACE Pro delivery platform. Campaign performance was measured by comparing open and click-through rates across the four advertisers' campaigns. The report survey didn't track conversion rates.