Harte-Hanks have published key email performance metrics for nine market sectors. The overall trend is of delivery rates increasing but open and click rates moving in the opposite direction.
Across all nine sectors:
- In 2009 email delivery rates were 93%, in 2010 95% of emails were delivered correctly.
- Open rates fell by 9%, to 17% in 2010.
- Click-rates remained at a static 3%.
- Unsubscribe rates fell slightly to 0.19%, compared to 2009.
- Bounce rates improved from 9% to 5% in 2010.
Harte-Hanks put the fall in open rates down to the insurance sector, which saw open rates drop from 68% in 2009 to 25% in 2010 (due to a change in emphasis from customer service emails to sales messages) as well as changes in the way email open rates are tracked through images, etc.
The research was conducted by examining 2.8 billion emails sent by 99 separate Harte-Hanks clients.
Source: Harte-Hanks – Harte-Hanks announces email key performance metrics for nine vertical markets