Email Open Rates Rise in First Quarter of 2009
By Anna Johnson on July 16th, 2009Shock, horror: the average open rate for marketing emails tracked by Epsilon rose during the first quarter of 2009, continuing a three-quarter trend.
According to the ‘Epsilon Q1 2009 Email Trends and Benchmarks’ report, open rates hit 22.1 percent in the first quarter, up 11.2 percent from the rate of 19.9 in the first quarter of 2008.
Epsilon, which has based its findings on 6 billion emails sent by more than 200 of its clients in January, February and March, also found a slight increase in email deliverability during the quarter. In the first quarter of 2009 deliverability hit 94.1 percent compared with 93.4 percent for the same quarter last year.
Epsilon found that open rates increased in 12 of 16 of the industries it measured, with the highest rate – 31.4 percent – in financial services and the lowest – 14.3 percent – in retail apparel vertical.
It seems one reason for the increase in average open rates is a renewed focus on email marketing during the global economic downturn and an associated rise in sophistication by email marketers.
Epsilon found, for example, that email marketers were increasingly using transactional and trigger-based messaging such as purchase confirmations, statement-ready alerts, and flight confirmation letters to deliver marketing communications.
Source: Fred Aun, “Open Rates for Marketing E-mail On the Rise, Says Epsilon,” ClickZ, July 9, 2009
