SURVEY: Email Open Rates Decline in First-Half of 2008

Chandra Johnson-Greene – www.circman.com

The overall unique open rates for emails sent by customers in all industries in the first six months of 2008 have declined slightly to 13.20 percent compared to 16.11 percent in the first-half of 2007, according to MailerMailer’s “Email Marketing Metrics Report,” which was released this month.

The report states that open rates have been declining since 2004 due to the rise in the amount of people using handheld devices and email programs that disable automatic image downloads—both factors affect the accuracy of open rates.

The industries that earned the highest unique open rates in the first half of 2008 were Banking/Finance (27.75 percent) Religious/Spiritual (26.69 percent), Government (25.60 percent) and Telecommunications (25.17 percent). Media/Publishing only captured 14.40 percent—down from 16.19 percent the same time last year—and made the report’s “Biggest Losers” list along with Large Business, Computer/Internet and Retail.

Click rates—how many times the links in an email message were clicked—also saw a slight decline from to 2.73 percent from 2.90 percent last year.

The report is based on email messages sent to 25 or more recipients between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2008 by a sampling of MailerMailer customers. Over 350 million email messages sent by over 3,200 permission-based email senders were analyzed.