Email service provider, Vision 6, has released its report on email marketing for the first half of 2008. Its results show a slight improvement in open rates and click-through rates (CTRs) among Australia email marketers.

Vision 6 based its report on 114 million messages from 55,000 campaigns sent by over 5,500 businesses between January and June 2008. Some of the key findings are as follows:

• The average open rate was 20.99 percent, up from 20.49 percent in the second half of 2007. The average open rate for lists with fewer than 500 recipients was 34.66 percent, presumably reflecting cleaner and more targeted/segmented lists. Open rates also varied according to industry, with government and defence having the highest open rate (39.55 percent) and advertising / media / entertainment having the lowest average open rate of 16.1 percent. Sales and marketing had an average open rate of 22.24 percent).
• The average CTR was 4.45 percent (i.e. the number of click- throughs as a percentage of emails sent), up from 4.16 percent in the second half of 2007. Again, smaller list sizes had higher CTRs – with an average CTR of 8.11 percent among small list sizes (fewer than 500 subscribers).
• Tuesday was the weekday with the highest percentage open rate (22.01 percent), even as email volume increased substantially on this day between January and June 2008. Meanwhile, Sunday had the highest average open rate overall – 25.87 percent, while only 1 percent of emails were sent on this day.
• The average deliverability rate was 89.66 percent.
• 50 percent of email recipients opened a given email within 8 hours of receipt, while over 75 percent of all email recipients who opened their email tended to do so within 24 hours of delivery. Meanwhile 5.8 percent tended to take more than a week to open a given email message.

Some interesting findings here. Not sure how indicative they are of emails sent by marketers elsewhere in the world, but interesting nonetheless…

Source: Vision 6, “Email Marketing Metrics Report Australia Jan-Jun 2008″

Related Articles:

• McDonald’s and Walgreens’ Email Lists Hacked
• Email Marketing: Most Emails Opened Within a Day of Receipt
• Email Marketing: How To Get Image-Heavy Emails Read
• Is Your Email Unsubscribe Rate Too High?
• Email Marketing Trends: Offering Gifts Gets Higher Open Rates Than Discount Offers

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 6:21 am and is filed under Email Marketing, Feature. 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.