Email services provider Silverpop reports that business-to-consumer (B2C) email marketers offering a gift with purchase or a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) promotion are seeing much higher open rates than those offering a percentage, dollar (or British pound) off a purchase, or just announcing a sale.

Based on its study of the email marketing programs of 70 retail and consumer product companies conducted in November 2009, Silverpop has also found that, overall, email marketers offering a discount offer of some kind are getting much higher open rates in November 2009 than during the same period last year.

While 62 percent of the companies studied included a discount offer of some type in their subject lines in 2009 – down from the 66 percent last year – the November 2009 average open rate for emails offering discounts was 31 percent, up sharply over the 17 percent open rate for the same kind of emails last year.

When offering a discount, companies were most likely to offer a percent off the cost of merchandise, with 27 percent in 2008 and 32 percent in 2009 doing so. Email marketers offering a gift with purchase or a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) promotion, however, achieved higher open rates than when offering a percentage, dollar (or British pound) off a purchase, or just announcing a sale.

The average open rate for emails promoting a gift with purchase or a BOGO was 36 percent, while percentage-off offers got a 21 percent open rate on average. Discounts offering savings in U.S. dollars or British pounds led to an average open rate of 12 percent, while emails that just offered a sale resulted in open rates of just 10 percent.

Email marketers imposing time limits on discount offers are also seeing higher email open rates than they did in 2008. In November 2009, 30 percent of emails included a time limit, with an average open rate of 23 percent. Last year, 25 percent of the emails studied included a time limit on offers, and those that did generated a mere 12 percent open rate.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 8:17 am and is filed under Conversion, Email Marketing, News and Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.