• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, November 11, 2005

Online marketing services company, eROI, Inc., will soon announce the results of their Q3 2005 study on email deliverability and efficiencies, which shows that email read and click rates are the lowest during the middle of the week and the highest on Sunday and Friday. In addition, the report reaffirms that sending volume is inversely related to how reads and clicks are going to react, with the exception of Saturday.

The study looks at day of the week statistics by list size, since aggregate stats show less dramatic changes. Averaging all read and click statistics provide results that are not equally applicable to large and small senders. The reason is that larger lists require more maintenance and make individual accuracy more difficult. Smaller lists are easily managed by marketing managers, concludes the report.

Key findings by mail list size, as defined in this report, are:

• Micro-Mailers, with less than 5,000 recipients, tend to perform similarly . Read rates in excess of 35% and click rates between 5% and 9%. With smaller prospect lists they allocate more time on creative and marketing plan dollars per prospect.
• Small senders, between 5,000 and 24,999 readers, start to see dramatic fluctuations in behavior and middle of the week mailings. Tuesday through Thursday become the prominent times email are sent compared to smaller senders.
• Mid-size senders, with 25,000-99,999 recipients, notice wide swings in read and click behavior with Monday and Friday registering the highest percentage of reads and clicks. On Friday, reads register a 60% increase over the average for the week, and clicks post a staggering 169% premium over the average for this size mailer.
• Large senders, with over 100,000 mailings, show that Monday through Wednesday are still king with the highest percentage of reads and clicks. Monday through Wednesday post a 32% increase in reads and just over twice as many clicks compared to the remaining days of the week.
• The one anomaly is that list sizes of over 200,000 recipients see a large spike in read rates on Saturdays, since most of these lists are B2C, and target consumers when they are likely to make shopping decisions.

Please use this link to view the PDF file on this study.