Internet marketing company DoubleClick published its final report over the bulk email marketing evolution this year. The
figures show year-over-year increase in delivery rates (cleaner emailing lists), and a decrease in open rates and
click-through rates. The variations are light, proving a steady and maturing environment.
DoubleClick's metrics
The data analyzed were based on more than 2 billion messages sent by hundreds DARTmail customers, measuring bouncebacks, open
rates, click-throughs and conversions (open to sales, or click to sales ratio). The results were reported for 2004 and
compared to 2003.
DoubleClick used unweighted averages for all analyzed categories. This helps eliminating the influence that large email
marketers could have over category averages, as the report states.
The email marketing categories considered in the study were:
Business Products & Services
Consumer Products
Consumer Services
Financial Services
Travel
Retail&Catalog
Publisher - Business
Publisher - Consumer
Email marketing performances
The bounce rates show a slight decline overall, and a more consistent decline in the Travel category, down 54.5% from 14.3%
to 6.5%.
Business Publishers was the only category that increased open rates, however slightly, from 38.2 to 38.3. For other
categories, open rates declined. The open rates' decline in most categories is possibly owed to SPAM increase and reveals
people's reticence to open messages they are not highly interested in.
Click through rates increased in only two categories, Consumer Publisher and Travel.
More interestingly, email-productivity has shown better figures in number of orders per email sent: 0.28% in 2004; but the
average revenue per email sent declined 26.9 percent. The average email order throughout 2004 was $89, in a year-over-year
declining trend.
Conclusion
About the overall productivity of bulk email marketing the report concludes: "email marketing is a maturing and relatively
stable marketing tool. Improvements in list hygiene and address collection processes seem to have improved bounce rates, but
flagging response rates suggest subscriber files are beginning to mature."
About the Author
Iulia Pascanu writes for http://www.emailmarketingsoftware.org/ where you can find more information about Email Marketing Software.
Please feel free to use this article in your Newsletter or on your website. If you use this article, please include the resource box and send a brief message to let me know where it appeared: mailto:iuliap@gmail.com