Bigfoot: Retail E-Mails Doubled In Third Quarter

Back-to-school sales and fall promotions drove the volume of retail marketing e-mails up by 81 percent from the second quarter to the third quarter of this year, according to a report released Tuesday by e-mail marketing giant Bigfoot Interactive.

"Volume will continue to grow because the medium is so cheap," said Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot. "The ads will become more sophisticated as advertisers concentrate on relevance, but you're going to see an increasing amount of e-mail in your inbox for some time to come."

The report released yesterday showed a quarter-over-quarter growth in click-through rate to 3.8 percent from 3.7 percent for promotional retail messages. Bigfoot also reported that deliverability for retail clients reached a record high of 94.6 percent, which DiGuido attributed to the continued "hygiene efforts" of the company's clients, which include weekly newsmagazine Newsweek, telecom MCI, and carmaker Honda, among others. Media led key verticals with a significant 95.2% overall delivery rate, with the editorial newsletters subset reaching a near-perfect delivery rate of 97.8%, Bigfoot found.

Click-through rates across all verticals and messaging types--promotional, service messaging, for example--fell year-over-year to 10.4 percent in this year's third quarter, from 10.9 percent in the third quarter of 2003, according to a Bigfoot representative. Similarly, a DoubleClick report released on Monday found that the average click-through rates fell from 9.2 percent to 8.2 percent year-over-year. DoubleClick also found that revenue per e-mail delivered dropped by 19.2 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2004.

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