My thanks to our client Tim Bishop of Bonallack & Bishop who sent me a copy of a report by Exact Target (an email marketing solutions firm). It is a comprehensive study of email open rates and click through rates for the whole of 2005 utilising data from more than 4,000 organisations, 230,000 email marketing campaigns and over 2.7 billion email messages.
These are the highlights.
Inverse relationship between list size and email responsiveness
Organizations with a B2B focus experienced higher open and click-through rates than their B2C counterparts.
52% of B2B email campaigns were sent to lists of less than 1,000 subscribers, and only 5.6% of B2B campaigns were sent to lists of more than 10,000 subscribers. Compare that with 41 % of B2C campaigns sent to lists of more than 10,000 subscribers.
Open Rates Decline
Open rates declined to 35.5% in the 4th quarter of 2005 from 42.5 % a year earlier.
Click-through Rates are Stable
Steady over the past two years, with a slight upturn in the second half of 2005, where they increased 10% to 6.6% from 6% a year earlier.
One of the key things for me was than open rates were significantly higher during the week, ranging from 37.9% on Mondays to 39.6% on Fridays, which on the whole says to be don't hold back your email for a specific day. More important is to send it "during the day" e.g. not overnight and not during lunchtime, else it risks getting lost in a barrage of email.
You can download the ExactTarget Email Marketing 2005 Response Rate Study if you want a copy of the whole thing.